Hardware Podcasts

BDD with Steve Branam

The Pragmatic Embedded Podcast · 26 Mar 2025 · 55m

What this episode covers

Steve Branam, an embedded software veteran with 40 years of experience including work on iRobot Roombas and automotive systems, explains how Behavior Driven Development (BDD) provides a disciplined layer on top of Test Driven Development (TDD) to avoid brittle tests. He details the Given-When-Then structure, the use of spies and test doubles to handle hardware interactions off-target, and strategies for testing state machines and system-level behaviors. Branam argues that BDD is applicable at all levels of embedded development, from unit tests to system integration, by using abstraction layers to isolate business logic from hardware dependencies.

Most relevant to

early-stage companies

Topics

Mentioned

Products
iRobot Roomba
Also
Dan North, James Grenning, Ian Cooper, Robert Martin, Michael Feathers

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