Whose domain is it anyway?

The brittleness of tests or specs is a recurring topic in BDD (or acceptance test-driven development, specification-by-example, or whatever you choose to call the thing where you write acceptance criteria, automate them and then make the application match). This is a tricky area, and there are probably as many styles of defining and grouping acceptance criteria as there are teams automating them.

The aspect I want to focus on in this article is domain language, because there’s a failure mode I encounter surprisingly often, which seems to have a common root cause.

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The perils of estimation

Business people want estimates. They want to know how much it’s going to cost them to get a solution, and they want to know how likely it is to come in on time and on budget. And of course quality is not negotiable.

Agile teams I encounter are at best nervous about estimates and at worst simply evasive. “You don’t need estimates if you’re doing Agile,” they say. “It will be ready when it’s done. We’re constantly adding value so we don’t need to commit to a date.”


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