This blog post is in response to Challenge 7 of the #GivenWhenThenWithStyle blog post series with Gojko Adzic You can see what the challenge is here: https://specflow.org/blog/how-to-deal-with-external-data-formats-givenwhenthenwithstyle/ Having the message format in the test would (as mentioned in the challenge) look terrible and would be difficult to understand. If I was to rewrite this scenario I would do something like the following: 1) Write a test that tests the validity of the payment message. So something like Scenario : payment message validity Given an account EE382200221020145685 has a balance When the system receives a payment message Then the payment message is valid. I would store the actual payment message in another file as not to clutter the scenario file and this message would be passed into the test in the When line. The Then part of the test could cover various areas, such as: - All the correct tags are present - The xml is valid 2) I would then add another tes