Introduction

XSpec is a Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) framework for XML processing, currently focused on XSLT.

BDD is like Test Driven Development (TDD) in that it encourages you to develop your code by

1. describing a behaviour (or writing a test)
2. testing whether your code gives that behaviour
3. if it doesn't, fixing the code until it does and the test passes

The difference between BDD and TDD is about how you write the tests. In BDD, your focus is on the behaviour of the code: the descriptions form the double role of both a human-readable documentation of what the code should do and runnable tests that can test whether the code does what it should do.

In BDD, we describe scenarios and the expected behaviour of the application with these scenarios. Scenarios fit particularly well with XSLT's source-driven (or template-driven) approach. For example, a scenario might be:

when processing a <para> element, it should create a <p> element.

or something more complex like:

when processing a <fn> element with a label attribute in footnote mode, it should create a <p> element with a <sup> child holding the value of the label element.

Scenarios written like this naturally map onto XSLT templates.

From Here

• Learn how to write XSpec scenarios.
• Learn how to run XSpec scenarios.