What BDD frameworks are popular in .net?

Question

I've recently been getting into BDD and think it holds great promise as a way to get a stakeholder's voice back in the apps we, as developers, create for them. What's your favorite BDD framework and why?

Edgewise

Answer 1

My personal favourite is MSpec since I really like the integration with Resharper. Using BDD style tests reads a lot better for me and MSPec is a nice, light framework to use.

Here some other popular frameworks:

• NBehave
• NSpec
• Another NSpec (not related to the above NSpec)

EDIT:

I've started using StoryQ in the past month or so, and have found it to be really good. In fact, I'm preferring it over MSpec. Will see how things turn out.

Chadburn

Any update on your preferences? I like the style of StoryQ for acceptance tests, and could see it being the king-of-the-hill there--but MSpec seems a bit better for writing more technical tests in the Context-Specification style – Macymad

@Macymad - I've been using StoryQ for a while now and have found it very effective. It can take longer to write up the tests, but you do get a code generator with StoryQ that takes your BDD text and turns them into code. StoryQ has that extra level of verbosity that MSpec lacked for me. I was finding it hard to expand on scenarios and contexts without getting tied up with code structure. MSpec is still ace though, highly recommended, but I'll stick with StoryQ for a while. – Chadburn

I'll second your vote for StoryQ. I don't mind the extra verbosity personally, as I find MSpec tries too hard to be terse and the obviousness of the lambda expressions just gets in the way for me (that, and the wanton abuse of underscores in method names, although StoryQ does use underscores in method names for its own purposes). – Chalice

Well it's been over a year since I answered this question, and I must admit that my favourite BDD tool is now SpecFlow. specflow.org. I think all the frameworks mentioned have their pluses, but overall for me, SpecFlow fits the bill nicely. I love the Visual Studio integration it has when writing feature files. Although NBehave does have VS integration also, the key thing for me is syntax colouring of the feature file which SpecFlow offers. – Chadburn

Answer 2

I haven't used any of the others, but appreciate StoryQ in my current projects since it uses NUnit which make the stories run just like any other unit test, hence allowing me to use TestDriven.Net as usual.

Also, the HTML report is very nice in order for the stakeholders to follow the progress (a web page on our TeamCity server).

Peafowl

Answer 3

Take a look at SpecFlow - it looks pretty good to me. Following a code camp presentation on BDD, I've decided to give it a chance and see how it fits into my work flow. There are some videos doing BDD here by Brady Gaster. Pretty good stuff.

Pelagic

Answer 4

I believe MSpec has growing popularity.

Cartouche

Answer 5

I like Concordion.NET as it is very flexible and powerful. Lately it was integrated with NUnit to run the Concordion.NET tests: https://github.com/concordion/concordion-net Thus, it can be used with any environment that supports NUnit test execution. Concordion.NET is an open source framework for Behavior Driven Development (BDD). Specifications of the expected behavior are written in HTML, so can be easily hyperlinked into a navigable structure. These files contain references to fixtures in test code that are executed with the help of NUnit. Concordion.NET acceptance tests are so readable, they can double up as system documentation. And, since the tests run against the system, you can be confident the documentation is always up-to-date.

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