BDD Clarified: BDD ≠ “Given-When-Then” (Gherkin)

BDD with RSpec, no Gherkin, is much better

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This article is one of the “IT Terminology Clarified” series.

Cucumber is the first Gherkin BDD framework, and it gained popularity gradually. Cucumber is written in Ruby, naturally, its clones were created, such as SpecFlow and JBehave, in other languages. However, many people think Cucumber (and its clones) is equivalent to BDD, that is wrong!

RSpec is the first BDD framework

First of all, Cucumber (or Gherkin) is not the first BDD framework, developed in Ruby. In Ruby’s world, the RSpec BDD framework was released nearly two years earlier than Cucumber.

RSpec v1.0 was released on 2009–07–25.

Cucumber v1.0 was released on 2011–06–20.