In this article, I will look at Specification by Example (SBE) as explained in Gojko Adzic’s book of the same name. It’s a collaborative effort between developers and non-developers to arrive at textual specifications that are coupled to automatic tests. You may also have heard of it as behaviour-driven development or executable specifications. These are not synonymous concepts, but they do overlap.
It's a common experience in any large, complex project. Crucial features do not behave as intended. Something was lost in the translation between intention and implementation, i.e., business and development. Inevitably we find that we haven’t built quite the right thing. Why wasn’t this caught during testing? Obviously, we’re not testing enough, or the wrong things. Can we make our tests more insightful?