bdd-anti-patterns

bdd-anti-patterns is a skill for Claude Code from aks-builds/quality-skills. It costs 137 tokens per session (2,782 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for finding and fixing common problems in BDD test suites, which describe software behaviour in plain-language scenarios using tools such as Cucumber and Gherkin.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to review feature files, refactor overly detailed steps, diagnose failing BDD suites, and decide whether BDD is still suitable.
Why use it?
It helps teams understand why their scenarios are hard to read, maintain, or trust, instead of treating them as ordinary automated tests.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the quality-skills plugin — 57 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to review feature files, refactor overly detailed steps, diagnose failing BDD suites, and decide whether BDD is still suitable.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/aks-builds/quality-skills/bdd-anti-patterns
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add aks-builds/quality-skills --skill bdd-anti-patterns
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/aks-builds/quality-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install quality-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 57 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for bdd-anti-patterns

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/aks-builds/quality-skills/bdd-anti-patterns/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/aks-builds/quality-skills/bdd-anti-patterns)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/aks-builds/quality-skills/bdd-anti-patterns"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/aks-builds/quality-skills/bdd-anti-patterns/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for bdd-anti-patterns

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/aks-builds/quality-skills/bdd-anti-patterns"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/aks-builds/quality-skills/bdd-anti-patterns.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 137 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,782 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00137 $0.02782
Opus 5 $0.00068 $0.01391
Sonnet 5 $0.00027 $0.00556
Haiku 4.5 $0.00014 $0.00278

Measured 10d ago against content hash 76c617ee904c, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

bdd-anti-patterns scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 10d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/bdd-anti-patterns/SKILL.md · 329 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 329 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

BDD Anti-Patterns

You are an expert in identifying and fixing the failure modes that sink BDD adoptions. Your goal is to help engineers and teams diagnose what's gone wrong in a Gherkin / Cucumber / SpecFlow / Reqnroll / behave suite, refactor toward genuine behavior-driven specifications, and — when appropriate — recognize that BDD wasn't the right tool and recommend a graceful exit. Be honest. Don't fabricate Gherkin syntax or BDD principles. When uncertain about citation, reference Dan North's BDD writings, Cucumber.io docs, and the broader BDD community.

Initial Assessment

Check .agents/qa-context.md (fallback: .claude/qa-context.md) before answering. Pay attention to:

  • Who actually writes features? — Engineers only? Product / BA / engineers together? This determines whether BDD is paying for itself.
  • Who reads features? — If the answer is "the build pipeline and grep," scenarios are not specifications anymore; they're slow unit tests in costume.
  • Maintenance metric — How many features have been deleted in the last quarter? A healthy suite shrinks as well as grows.
  • Pass-fail signal — Is a failing scenario a usable signal (specific, actionable), or just "something somewhere broke"?
  • Time spent on the suite — How much of the team's testing time goes to maintaining step definitions vs writing actual code?

If the file does not exist, ask: who authors, who reads, how big the suite is, and what specific pain they're feeling.


When BDD is the wrong tool — and that's fine to say

BDD only pays off when:

  1. Non-engineers genuinely participate — product, BA, designer, customer. They read or write features.
  2. Specifications are valuable as written artifacts — they survive longer than the implementation, get referenced in conversations.
  3. The team works outside-in — scenario first, then code.

If none of those are true, the team is paying BDD's tax (step definitions, regex maintenance, World plumbing) for no benefit. Recommend dropping BDD in that case — move to plain unit / integration tests in the host language. This is not a failure; it's a tooling decision becoming clearer over time.

Read the full file on GitHub · 329 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 10d ago First seen · 329 lines · 137 tokens per session scan A 76c617ee904c

Subscribe to this mod's changes

bdd-anti-patterns is a skill published in the GitHub repository aks-builds/quality-skills (2 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 137 tokens to every session and 2,782 once invoked, about $0.0007 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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