Using Behavioral Driven Development (BDD) in Capstone Design Projects

To assist undergraduate engineering students define the functional requirements and acceptance criteria for their capstone design project, behavioral driven development (BDD) was applied for the first time with a team of three students. This team designed a complex system for health care monitoring consisting of hardware and software elements. This case study is presented in this paper, which includes an overview of BDD, how it was implemented in a two-semester Capstone course sequence, and the lessons learned from this new approach. This paper is written from the point of view of faculty advisor and industry sponsor, who closely followed the use of the BDD approach by the student team.