Most people would agree that testing your code is a good thing. And there is little doubt that modern Test-Driven development practices, when applied well, can produce high quality software that is reliable, flexible and easy to maintain. However, one of the big problems that often happens when developers adopt Test-Driven Development is that they concentrate so much on the tests that they lose focus on what they are actually meant to be testing. This results in writing large numbers of superficial and inefficient tests, without testing the underlying user requirements in any real depth.

Behaviour-Driven development is one way to counter this. In Behaviour-Driven development, you no longer focus on writing tests. Instead, you concentrate on describing what it is you want your class to do before you start writing tests. In other words, you describe the behaviour of your class. This is very much in the original spirit of test-driven development, where the real aim is to design good software - writing tests is very much a means, not an objective in itself.

Easyb is a fairly new BDD framework based on Groovy. It makes it very easy to write your tests using a clear, structured and easy-to-understand BDD-style approach. These test scripts become a very clear way of describing your business requirements, in a way that the end-user can actually understand. In addition, using Groovy to write your unit tests has many benefits. In Groovy, you get all the advantages of a scripting language while still being able to access all your Java classes. But possibly most importantly of all, the highly expressive Groovy language features such as list manipulation and closures make it a real pleasure to write thorough and comprehensive business-level tests.

Recently, I've been giving talks on Easyb at conferences and in Java User Groups around Australia and New Zealand. Here are the slides from this presentation, which run through the main features of Easyb: