Using BDD with a system comprised of multiple services

[Harrison Brown]

This isn't necessarily a DDD question but I reckon the folks in this community will have useful insights regardless!

How do you go about applying BDD to a system that comprises multiple services? 

We're developing a system at the moment that requires orchestration between a few different services to achieve one business outcome so our options seem to be (a) write BDD scenarios at the service level in their respective Git repositories, describing only their own behaviour, or (b) write BDD scenarios at a level higher in a dedicated repository and describe the behaviour of the whole system.

Option (a) has the obvious downside that lots of the behaviour the business cares about involves multiple services so the BDD scenarios are anaemic, but option (b) is a pain to automate because the test code (we use Behat) can't easily reach 'inside' any of the individual services to set up our Given steps.

If anyone has any thoughts, however brief, on this — or could point me to a book/article/video on the subject — I'd be grateful.

Thanks,
Harrison

[Harrison Brown]

(Equally, if anyone can point me to a BDD community where this question would be better asked that's helpful too.)

[Chris Sampson]

Hi, 

We use BDD inside the solution at a unit test level for each service, that's where you should be able to "reach inside", but still use the public interface for this. For us that is messaging, so commands in (given, when) and events out (then).
We also use at the integration level, testing across multiple services. For this we use the web service endpoints, calling them directly over http (given, when) and check responses from them (Then)
We also use it a UI level where we use a UI testing framework to interact with the application.

Units are far more granular (and thus more numerous) than Ints. Ints just do enough to cover all service to service interactions that cannot be covered in units and Ints are more granular than Web UI tests.

Hope that helps

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[Chris Sampson]

The scenarios are most "business like" at the web UI level, and least  "business like" at the unit level.