Origins of Behavior-Driven Development

Question

I'm reading the book 'BDD in Action' by John Ferguson Smart. According to it, BDD draws inspiration from:

• TDD (write tests first)
• DDD (common language for business and development)
• ATDD (specification by example)

What it brings to the table:

• executable specification (specification is written in such a way that is also understandable by computers and therefore can be used as objective acceptance and regression tests that can run automatically as part of the build process)

Are my conclusions correct?

Answer 1

The origins go back till 1996 according to this Wikipedia article about Specification by Example:

The earliest documented usage of realistic examples as a single source of truth, requirements and automated tests, on software projects is the WyCash+ project, described by Ward Cunningham in the paper A Pattern Language of Competitive Development in 1996. The name Specification by Example was coined by Martin Fowler in 2004.

Specification by Example is an evolution of the Customer Test practice of Extreme Programming proposed in 1999 and Ubiquitous Language idea from Domain-driven design from 2004, using the idea of black-box tests as requirements described by Weinberg and Gause in 1989.

Also read the article of Martin Fowler about this subject.

Answer 2

A lot of times software's even for testing is based on needs and trends. Prior to the newest and greatest... testing and QA were done manually. As time evolved, regression testing evolved and visual regression became more mainstream... again this will again evolve into other forms when the need arise.