How to name your BDD scenarios

Naming Cucumber features and scenarios doesn’t have to be hard, but 95% of teams get it wrong.

And when you get it wrong, you won’t get anywhere near the benefits of a BDD process that you could normally expect.

Here are 3 simple traps to avoid when naming your features and scenarios.

- MAKE THEM UNIQUE: Each scenario and feature name should be unique. Think of them like chapter or section headings in a book — having several features or scenarios with identical names will just introduce confusion.

- MAKE THEM CONCISE: Keep them short, just like chapter or section headings. Don’t say “Search reports with by providing filter data for custom fields Program, Market Segment and Manager dropdowns on Filter edits screen” or “As a manager, I want to…”. Say “Filtering Search Reports” instead. You can (and should) put additional details after the feature or scenario title where appropriate.

- MAKE THEM DOCUMENTATION: Titles should express the requirement (“Shopping cart totals”) or a business rule (“Total prices should include VAT”), and not be written like an instruction to a tester (“Check the shopping cart total price”). Avoid using words like “Check” or “Verify”.

💬 Want to learn more about how to do BDD properly? Here are a few additional resources…

🤯 Learn how to use BDD to give your team more clarity and vision, AND how to write scenarios that are easier to automate and to maintain, in the “Agile Requirements Discovery Blueprint” course: https://loom.ly/nLRBdmU

🤯 Learn how to automate BDD scenarios faster and more easily in Java with Cucumber and Serenity BDD: https://loom.ly/rlySjl4