How Behavior-Driven Development Lost Its Way (And How We Can Restore It)

By Shrini kulkarni July 3, 2025

Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) emerged not so long ago as a bold, hopeful idea. It wasn’t meant to be about automation, or about frameworks, or even primarily about testing. It was a philosophy—an approach that emphasized shared understanding.

“When BDD is genuinely integrated into the Agile process—with Product Owners or Business Analysts authoring scenarios, and the entire sprint team collaboratively discussing and refining them—it serves as a powerful, living specification for developers and testers alike. This is BDD at its best.

However, when BDD originates primarily from the automation or testing side, without true business involvement, it becomes a hollow exercise—confined within the QA team, disconnected from its original purpose. In such cases, it is not good practice; it is a misuse of BDD. Wherever possible, teams should avoid falling into this trap.”

BDD promised a world where business people, developers, and testers would come together, using simple, structured conversations to define the behavior of a system before any code was written. Feature files and scenarios were supposed to be the byproducts of rich discussions—not artifacts manufactured in isolation. They were meant to help teams understand what they were building, why they were building it, and how success would be judged.

At its heart, BDD was about conversations first, documentation second, and automation last. It was supposed to make software development more humane, more business-aligned, and ultimately more successful.

But over time, as often happens, the vision blurred. The emperor grew old.

The Original Vision

Before examining how BDD lost its way, let’s be clear about what it was designed to achieve:

To create a shared language between business and technical team members
To focus on behavior rather than implementation details
To emphasize collaborative discovery of requirements
To document those requirements in a human-readable format
To ensure software delivers business value by meeting defined behaviors

When implemented as intended, BDD starts with conversations—”Three Amigos” meetings where business representatives, developers, and testers discuss features using concrete examples. These examples become the scenarios written in Gherkin format (Given-When-Then), creating a living documentation of the system’s behavior. Only after this collaborative process should automation be considered.

A successful BDD implementation might look like this:

Product Owner brings a user story to the team
Team discusses specific examples of how users would interact with the feature
Together, they document these examples as scenarios
Developers use these scenarios to guide implementation
Testers use the same scenarios as the basis for validation
Automation engineers may then automate these scenarios for regression testing

This approach ensures everyone shares the same understanding of what needs to be built and why.

The Sidetracking of a Noble Idea

As software engineering evolved, automation became the new norm. Tools like Cucumber and SpecFlow saw an opportunity to “extend” BDD by making feature files executable. Thus, the concept of “Executable Specifications” was born. It promised that your requirements could become your tests, and your tests could validate your requirements simultaneously.

It was a powerful idea. But it was also a dangerous simplification

In practice, this meant that instead of business people leading the creation of behavior models, automation engineers and testers began writing the feature files. The conversation part of BDD was quietly pushed aside, replaced by a mechanical process: write some Gherkin, wire it to some code, and call it collaboration.

The tool vendors won. The original spirit of BDD—collaborative discovery of behavior—lost.

Today, in many organizations, BDD is no longer a conversation starter. It’s a technical artifact, a layer sitting awkwardly between requirements and code, maintained at significant cost but often delivering very little return.

The Misuse, the Decay

Not content with deviating from the BDD’s purpose, teams often worsened the situation through careless practices.
In many places, testers would first write open-format test cases—plain, traditional test cases—and then, at management’s direction, write Gherkin scenarios as a representation of original test cases. Afterward, they would wire these scenarios into step definitions and automation code

Thus, for every feature, there were now three versions of the same test:

A free-format test case
A Gherkin scenario
Automation code glued behind the scenes

None of these layers meaningfully modeled behavior. None captured rich user journeys, business rules, or risk-based thinking. Each layer simply rephrased the same shallow validations—click this, enter that, select dropdown, verify success message.

Meanwhile, feature files became polluted with GUI references, technical fields, and control-level operations. Step definitions exploded into dozens of near-identical variants (“I click on the Login button,” “I press Login,” “Click the Login link”)—turning what should have been a structured library into an unmaintainable spaghetti mess.

BDD, once envisioned as a bridge between business and technology, became instead a burden—an extra ceremony between bad test cases and fragile automation.

The True Consequences

The result of this decay is visible to anyone willing to look honestly.

Today, many teams live with:

Feature files no Product Owner reads
Automation packs that pass every day, but miss critical behaviors
Flaky, fragile tests that break not because the product broke, but because the Gherkin was tied too closely to a field label
Inflated reports of “automation coverage” that hide a hollow core
Mounting maintenance overheads with diminishing returns

Test design suffers because Gherkin writing replaces behavior modeling. Automation suffers because scenarios map to screens, not flows. Business stakeholders disengage because feature files have nothing meaningful to say to them anymore.

BDD, in many cases, is now just a tired ritual—a once-great emperor, kept on the throne by inertia, ceremony, and the weight of sunk cost.

The Emperor’s Aging Reign

It’s hard to admit when an idea we once loved has stopped serving us. But the truth is unavoidable: BDD, as practiced in many teams today, has failed to deliver on its original promise.

It does not bridge business and technology anymore
It does not guarantee shared understanding
It does not ensure better test design
It certainly does not make automation more robust

Instead, it demands maintenance. It demands compliance. And too often, it delivers little in return.

The spirit of BDD—conversations, collaboration, shared behavior modeling—remains noble. But the form of BDD—Gherkin scripts wired tightly to fragile automation code—has grown old, brittle, and increasingly irrelevant to the realities of modern software delivery.

The emperor still wears a crown, but the court is empty.

Successful BDD: A Glimpse of What Could Be

Despite the prevailing misuse, some teams have managed to preserve BDD’s original intent. These success stories share common elements:

Business stakeholders actively write and own the scenarios
Scenarios focus on business outcomes, not technical implementations
The team views BDD as a communication tool first, automation tool second
Feature files reflect real business language, not technical jargon
Regular refinement sessions keep scenarios relevant and meaningful

For example, one financial services team uses BDD effectively by having product managers draft initial scenarios based on customer research. Developers and testers then collaborate to refine these scenarios before any coding begins. The resulting feature files serve as both a development guide and living documentation that business stakeholders regularly review.

Respectful Retirement or Careful Restoration?

There is still hope, for those willing to act with honesty. In some places, BDD can be saved—but only by returning to its roots:

Conversation-first
Behavior modeling, not GUI wiring
Feature files as living documents, not technical artifacts

This restoration requires commitment from the entire team, especially business stakeholders. Product Owners must take ownership of scenarios. Developers must view scenarios as requirements, not just tests. Testers must focus on behaviors, not just automatable steps.

If that restoration is impossible—if the organization’s reality is that business people will never engage meaningfully with Gherkin again—then it is better to retire BDD gracefully. There is no shame in moving on. Clean business service layers, good modeling of flows and rules, well-

designed, code-driven tests—these can serve teams better today than ceremonial BDD ever will.

The spirit that gave birth to BDD is still alive—the need for shared understanding, faster feedback, and clear modeling has never been greater. But it may now need new tools, new habits, and new practices—unburdened by the trappings of an aging emperor.

“When BDD becomes a testing artifact instead of a collaboration tool, it loses its meaning.”

About the Author

Shrini Kulkarni

Principal Automation Consultant, QualityKiosk Technologies

Shrini Kulkarni is an innovative senior technical leader and independent consultant with over 26 years of expertise in software QA, testing, and automation across banking, insurance, retail, cards, payments, and sanctions. He’s known for delivering complex projects globally, building high-performance teams, and leading Centers of Excellence. Shrini has held leadership roles at top companies, developed enterprise testing frameworks, and is a frequent conference speaker. He holds a postgraduate degree from IIT Chennai.