Automated Behavioral Specification Using Generative Ai: Transforming Behavior Driven Development Practices

Abstract

The accelerating complexity of modern software systems, together with the intensification of continuous delivery practices, has placed unprecedented pressure on traditional approaches to requirements engineering, testing, and quality assurance. Behavior Driven Development has emerged as a socio technical and methodological response to these pressures by offering a structured, natural language oriented, and collaborative approach to specifying and validating software behavior. Yet despite its conceptual promise, Behavior Driven Development has historically faced challenges related to scalability, maintenance of specifications, stakeholder participation, and the cost of producing and evolving automated test suites. In recent years, generative artificial intelligence has been introduced as a powerful technological force capable of transforming how Behavior Driven Development artifacts are created, maintained, and executed. The work of Tiwari (2025) provided one of the first systematic and empirically grounded explorations of how generative models can be embedded into Behavior Driven Development pipelines to automate scenario generation, improve test coverage, and enhance development velocity while preserving semantic fidelity between stakeholder intent and executable tests. Building upon this foundational contribution, the present study undertakes a comprehensive theoretical and methodological synthesis of the evolving relationship between Behavior Driven Development and generative artificial intelligence. Drawing on an extensive corpus of empirical and conceptual research, including systematic mapping studies, industrial case studies, and quality models, this article develops a unified framework that explains how generative artificial intelligence reshapes collaborative testing, requirement articulation, and quality assurance. The analysis demonstrates that generative automation does not merely accelerate existing practices but fundamentally alters the epistemic and organizational foundations of Behavior Driven Development by redistributing cognitive labor between humans and machines, reshaping traceability structures, and enabling new forms of continuous quality governance. The results further suggest that generative artificial intelligence, when aligned with Behavior Driven Development principles, can significantly mitigate long standing challenges such as specification drift, ambiguity in user stories, and the fragility of test suites in rapidly evolving code bases. At the same time, the study critically examines emerging risks related to over automation, loss of stakeholder agency, and the opacity of model driven test generation. Through a detailed interpretive synthesis of the literature and a rigorous methodological design, this article contributes a theoretically grounded and practically relevant account of how generative artificial intelligence is redefining Behavior Driven Development as a cornerstone of future software engineering.