If Test-First Development (TFD) is a specialized subset of Test-Driven Development (TDD), then surely the equivalent specialized subset of Behavior-Driven Development is Behavior-First Development.

Today I had my first experience in developing BFD.

I know what you’re thinking:  BFD.

But it’s a BFD to me.  Using a rather exotic concoction of DBUnit, HSQLDB, Selenium, Cargo and EasyB, I was able to write a story  to describe some new functionality for a web application, and run that story as a test (via EasyB/Groovy), before I wrote any of the code to implement the functionality.

Other ingredients in this concoction:  Tomcat, Ant, Junit, Struts2, Spring, Cobertura and four or five different logging frameworks.

Observations:

•  It is difficult to see what is going on when your story fails - the story failure is often fairly far away from the  code failure.
• DBUnit throws multiple exceptions as part of normal operating procedure.  That is a crime against humanity.