Authors:
Mohammad Z. Anjum
1
;
Silvana Togneri Mac Mahon
1
and
Fergal McCaffery
2
Affiliations:
1
Regulated Software Research Centre, Dundalk Institute of Technology, Co. Louth, Ireland
;
2
School of Computing, Dublin City University, Dublin 9, Ireland
Keyword(s):
Automated Acceptance Testing, Requirement Engineering, Behaviour Driven Development, BDD, Software Requirements, Medical Software, Health Software.
Abstract:
The health software industry is facing an immense challenge of managing quality and preventing software failures. Poorly defined requirements are one of the significant cause of health software failures. Agile practices are being increasingly used by the software industry to develop systems on time and within budget with improved software quality and user acceptance. Behaviour-driven development (BDD) is an agile software engineering practice that can help to improve health software quality vastly. BDD achieves this by prioritising the illustration of software’s behaviour using ubiquitous language, followed by automated acceptance testing to assess if the illustrated behaviour was achieved. This paper presents a review of BDD literature, including the characteristics of BDD and examines how BDD can benefit health software quality. The paper reviews health software standards and guidelines, to examine their compatibility with a BDD approach. Finally, the paper details future plans for
the development of a framework that provides health software companies with a detailed step by step guideline on how to use BDD to develop safer health software.
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