BDD Reference

terraform-compliance utilises radish to handle BDD directives. BDD is used in many development practices from End-to-End testing to FrontEnd testing, provides easy-to-understand context that is self-descriptive and easy-to-understand for someone that is reading the test results.

In BDD, every feature file will have 3 components ;

Feature
Scenario/Scenario Outline
Steps

Feature

This draws the overall picture of the feature file that may consist several scenarios.

For e.g. ;

Feature: Security Groups should be used to protect services/instances
  In order to improve security
  As engineers
  We'll use AWS Security Groups as a Perimeter Defence

This won’t affect anything about the test steps, but it will ease the pain for everybody to understand what does that feature aims for.

Scenario

Every feature might have multiple scenarios. A scenario will define a test that might include multiple steps with BDD directives like ;

GIVEN
WHEN
THEN

and every step might also have an additional extension step starting with ;

There are two types of Scenario ;

Scenario : Used for defining a scenario without any multiple dynamic variables.
Scenario Outline : Used for defining a scenario loops by giving multiple dynamic variables.

A Scenario can be like ;

Scenario: Ensure all resources have tags
    Given I have resource that supports tags defined
    Then it must contain tags
    And its value must not be null

Where a Scenario Outline could be ;

Scenario Outline: Ensure that specific tags are defined
    Given I have resource that supports tags defined
    When it contains tags
    Then it must contain <tags>
    And its value must not be null
    
    Examples:
      | tags           |
      | Name           |
      | Business Unit  |
      | Cost Centre    |
      | Environment    |
      | Major Function |
      | Service        |
      | Work Order     |
      | Service Level  |
      | Creator        |

Steps

Steps are the functional tests that is actually executing necessary task to validate if the test is successful or not.

terraform-compliance has fixed steps already defined within the tool. It is possible to drill down your terraform resources by using these fixed steps.

BDD Reference

Feature

Scenario

Steps

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