Sunday, November 21, 2010

What's in a Story? [Dan North]

Behaviour-driven development is an “outside-in” methodology. It starts at the outside by identifying business outcomes, and then drills down into the feature set that will achieve those outcomes. Each feature is captured as a “story”, which defines the scope of the feature along with its acceptance criteria. This article introduces the BDD approach to defining and identifying stories and their acceptance criteria.

Introduction
Software delivery is about writing software to achieve business outcomes. It sounds obvious, but often political or environmental factors distract us from remembering this. Sometimes software delivery can appear to be about producing optimistic reports to keep senior management happy, or just creating “busy work” to keep people in paid employment, but that’s a topic for another day.

Usually, the business outcomes are too coarse-grained to be used to directly write software (where do you start coding when the outcome is “save 5% of my operating costs”?) so we need to define requirements at some intermediate level in order to get work done.

Behaviour-driven development (BDD) takes the position that you can turn an idea for a requirement into implemented, tested, production-ready code simply and effectively, as long as the requirement is specific enough that everyone knows what’s going on. To do this, we need a way to describe the requirement such that everyone – the business folks, the analyst, the developer and the tester – have a common understanding of the scope of the work. From this they can agree a common definiton of “done”, and we escape the dual gumption traps of “that’s not what I asked for” or “I forgot to tell you about this other thing”.

This, then, is the role of a Story. It has to be a description of a requirement and its business benefit, and a set of criteria by which we all agree that it is “done”. This is a more rigorous definition than in other agile methodologies, where it is variously described as a “promise of a conversation” or a “description of a feature”. (A BDD story can just as easily describe a non-functional requirement, as long as the work can be scoped, estimated and agreed on.)

continue here : http://blog.dannorth.net/whats-in-a-story/

Writing Testable Systems

Writing Testable Systems
— Complex enterprise applications are generally hard to maintain, and risky and difficult to change. As a new developer on a team, a large legacy code base is often difficult to understand, especially when the code has evolved over a long period and new functionality has been grafted onto an existing application.

Test-Driven Development Is Not About Testing

Test-Driven Development Is Not About Testing
— I am always on the look out for good questions to ask candidates in an interview. Not the 'How many oranges can I fit in this room?' kind of nonsense (the stock response to which is apparently 'with or without us standing in it?').