Empirical Findings on BDD Story Parsing to Support Consistency Assurance between Requirements and Artifacts

Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) stories have gained considerable attention in recent years as an effective way to specify and test user requirements in agile software development projects. External testing frameworks also allow developers to automate the execution of BDD stories and check whether a fully functional software system behaves as expected. However, other software artifacts may quite often lose synchronization with the stories, and many inconsistencies can arise with respect to requirements representation. This paper reports on preliminary empirical findings regarding the performance of two existing approaches in the literature intended to support consistency assurance between BDD stories and software artifacts. The first approach involves the parsing of BDD stories in order to identify conceptual elements to automatically generate consistent class diagrams, while the second approach seeks to identify interaction elements to automatically assess the consistency of task models and GUI prototypes. We report on the precision of these approaches when applied to a study with BDD stories previously written by Product Owners (POs). Based on the results, we also identify a set of challenges and opportunities for BDD stories in the consistency assurance of such artifacts.