In my search to understand a little more about BDD and BDD frameworks, one gem that I gleaned is that there is an important distinction between “Spec” and “Behavior” frameworks. “Spec” is intended for the unit level granularity (like unit tests) and “Behavior” is intended to relay user stories at the application level.
This makes sense to me because in all the BDD discussions I’ve seen I had a hard time understanding why you want to put an application level story on top of a unit level story. it just didn’t make sense.
So here’s what I get so far (correct me):
I can use Behavior Frameworks to create stories that use the same shared language that my customer would understand, at the application level use cases. Most frameworks that support this allow you to “code” this up which still has a lot of friction for most people to read so it’s a problem.
I can use Spec Frameworks to replace the language I use in my current unit tests so that instead of “testing” I am defining “behavior” of a component at the unit level. this is usually almost a purely syntactical change in nature.
Some Frameworks have APIs for both Specs and Behaviors (like RSpec). Some only have APIs for one of them (which ones?)