Archive for category Business Analysis

Scenario-Oriented vs. Rules-Oriented Acceptance Criteria

Acceptance Criteria, Scenarios, Acceptance Tests are, in my experience, often a source of confusion. Such confusion results in questions like the one asked of Rachel Davies recently, i.e. “When to write story tests” (sometimes also known as “Acceptance Tests” or in BDD parlance “Scenarios”). In her answer, Rachel highlighted that: “…acceptance criteria and example scenarios [...]

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Old Favourite – More Sharks and Delaying Critical Mass

This article originally featured on my old blog on 19th January 2010. In a previous post I talked about Critical Mass of software. I showed how an ever-increasing cost of change resulted in it becoming more economical to completely rewrite the system than to enhance and maintain the original. I explained how this could be [...]

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Old Favourite – Sharks, Debts, Critical Mass and other reasons to Sustain Quality

This article originally featured on my old blog on 18th January 2010. A while back I tweeted about critical mass of software: Critical Mass of Code – past which the changeability of the code is infeasible, requiring that it be completely rewritten. An elaboration of this might be: Critical Mass of Software: the state of [...]

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What do special forces teams have in common with agile teams?

In 2008, I wrote an article for Better Software Magazine… “Few would think that Special Forces tactics bear any relation to software project teams. But Antony Marcano draws a surprising parallel between the dynamics of modern Special Forces “room-clearing” methods and the dynamics of modern software development teams.” My thinking has moved on slightly since [...]

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Old Favourite: Feature Injection User Stories on a Business Value Theme

This originally appeared on my old blog in May 2010 Feature Injection, an approach to Agile Business Analysis created by Chris Matts, is a much misunderstood thing –. It is a way of combining several techniques to understand just enough of a business problem to start expressing solutions to it. It provides specific techniques to [...]

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A bit of UCD for BDD & ATDD: Goals -> Tasks -> Actions

There’s something wrong with many behaviour specs (or acceptance tests). It’s been this way for some time. I’ve written about this once or twice before, referencing this post by Kevin Lawrence from 2007. So, first things first, I want to take this opportunity to update the terminology I use… Goals -> Tasks -> Actions A [...]

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Old Favourite: Taking Repetition To Task

This originally appeared on my old blog on 16th March 2010… Others have talked about the virtues of stories as vertical slices of a problem (end-to-end capabilities) rather than horizontal slices (system layers or components). So, if we slice the problem with user stories, how do we slice the user-stories themselves? If, as I sometimes [...]

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You’re almost cuking it…

In “You’re Cuking it Wrong”, Jonas Nicklas, shows several examples of bad scenarios (or acceptance tests whichever term you prefer) and demonstrates better approaches. This is an excellent post on common mistakes made when writing example scenarios with Cucumber. I think, however, he could have gone further in one case. One of his examples of [...]

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Taking repetition to task

This originally appeared on my old blog in March 2010. Others have talked about the virtues of stories as vertical slices of a problem (end-to-end capabilities) rather than horizontal slices (system layers or components). So, if we slice the problem with user stories, how do we slice the user-stories themselves? If, as I sometimes say, [...]

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2 Comments