Behavior-Driven Development in Product Configuration Systems

Product Configuration Systems (PCS) are increasingly used by companies to automate the performance of the sales and engineering processes. Since the benefits from such projects have huge variations, it is crucial to make the right decisions when scoping and developing PCSs. The development of PCS is influenced by both business interests and technical insights. Developers of PCS face various challenges while working in team,including different stakeholders such as business owners, developers, project managers, and product experts. The more diverse the team is, the more significant are the challenges. This paper suggests that Behavior-driven Development (BDD) may provide configuration teams with a specific structure to express scenarios (and thus constraints) on PCS in natural language. BDD may yield benefits such as a better expression of PCS constraints, more efficient communication of requirements and incorporation of the expressed rules in a software transformation process. In other words, applying BDD may eliminate unnecessary tasks when gathering knowledge, developing, and testing PCS projects. In this paper, we present a novel approach from an ongoing project on how to relate BDD to the development process of PCS while using Scrum-based methods.