Vocabulary

Whose domain is it anyway?

8 mins

The brittleness of tests or specs is a recurring topic in BDD (or acceptance test-driven development, specification-by-example, or whatever you choose to call the thing where you write acceptance criteria, automate them and then make the application match). This is a tricky area, and there are probably as many styles of defining and grouping acceptance criteria as there are teams automating them.

The aspect I want to focus on in this article is domain language, because there’s a failure mode I encounter surprisingly often, which seems to have a common root cause.