Software Development Practices

Behavior driven development (or BDD) is an agile software development technique that encourages collaboration between developers, QA and non-technical or business participants in a software project. BDD focuses on obtaining a clear understanding of desired software behaviour through discussion with stakeholders. It extends TDD by writing test cases in a natural language that non-programmers can read.

Lean programming is a concept that emphasizes optimizing efficiency and minimizing waste in the development of a computer program. The concept is that efficiencies can be applied and waste managed at all levels: each individual, every department, interdepartmental operations, the organization as a whole, and the relationships of the organization with customers and suppliers. Lean Programming teaches you to eliminate wasted effort in development projects by favoring "pull" design over "push" design. This means infrastructure concerns like persistence should only be designed and built to satisfy the needs of business requirements (pulled on demand) instead of building the data access layer code that you think the application will need later (pushed).

Continuous integration (CI) implements continuous processes of applying quality control - small pieces of effort, applied frequently. Continuous integration aims to improve the quality of software, and to reduce the time taken to deliver it, by replacing the traditional practice of applying quality control after completing all development.

Continuous design is a software development practice of creating and modifying the design of a system as it is developed, rather than specifying the system completely before development starts, (as in the waterfall model) or in bursts at the beginning of each iteration (as in the iterative model). Also called "evolutionary design" or "incremental design", continuous design was popularized by extreme programming. Continuous design also uses test driven development and refactoring. It is similar to, and generally used with, continuous integration.

Convention over configuration is a design philosophy and technique that seeks to apply defaults that can be implied from the structure of the code instead of requiring explicit code. The idea is to simplify development by allowing the developer to worry only about the unconventional parts of the application and architecture.