Monthly Archives: March 2011

Agile, BDD/ATDD, Business Analysis, Old Favourites, Software Development

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

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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 incrementally and iteratively comprehend each of the following:

  • The business value sought (the why)
  • The problem domain (what specifically needs solving to deliver that value)
  • The resulting roles, incentives and product capabilities (the solution)

Basically, it helps us to evolve everyone’s understanding of the business-need as we (by other means) also evolve the implementation of the product.

Now, before you say, “it’s nothing new”, Chris Matts will be the first to agree. He’s taken his experience of various techniques, combined several of them that often work, evolved it into an approach to agile business analysis and given it a name.

I wish I could explain all of this now, but we’ll have to save that for another day. This post is intended to try to explain the relationship between Feature Injection and User Stories.

I’ve seen several examples of user stories taking some inspiration from Feature Injection, however, I’m not sure any of them do Feature Injection enough justice.

A common story

One of the problems with how User Stories are often applied is that people focus on the role, the capability and then try to work out what the benefit is. This is quite natural, explained nicely by Udi Dahan:

Users ultimately dictate solutions to us, as a delta from the previous set of solutions we’ve delivered them. That’s just human psychology
– writer’s block when looking at a blank page, as compared to the ease with which we provide ‘constructive criticism’ on somebody else’s work

This is something that other aspects of Feature Injection actually help you to solve… but again, today I’m just focusing on user stories…

The tendency of people to dictate solutions, rather than the problem that needs solving, has lead some to emphasise that we should put the benefit of the story first. For example, let’s say a fictional printer manufacturer consistently entices 3% of everyone they e-mail, reminding them to check their ink-levels, to purchase print consumables. In this situation, some might illustrate taking a story like this…


As the PrintCo marketing manager
I want customers to register their e-mail addresses
So that we increase the sales of our print consumables

And changing it to this:


In order to increase the number of sales of our print consumables
As a marketing manager
I want customers to register their e-mail addresses

The intent behind this shuffling around is to get people to think about the problem in order of business value first, then the stakeholder then what the stakeholder thinks will deliver the value.

But, the story is talking about a stakeholder… In my experience, this doesn’t get the best value from the user story approach.

Stakeholder ‘stories’ or User Stories?

I’ve found that user stories are most useful when communicating to the team if they encourage a conversation around who the user is, what capability the user needs and why it’s important to the user (could that be why they are called “user stories”?). This helps us to understand what user experience they need and what capability will make that possible.

This template, brought to us by Rachel Davies and Tim McKinnon’s 2001 XP Day session “Tuning XP”, helps us with that:


As <some role>
I want <some capability>
So that <some benefit>

If we discuss this solely from the business stakeholder’s point of view, the team doesn’t get as much understanding from what is needed by the user or why the user will need this capability. If the capability summarises what the product will enable or do for user it’s a lot easier to see what needs to be changed in the product. The benefit should be the answer to “what’s in it for the user?” or “why would they want the product to do that?” (exploring the persona of the user is helpful in finding this out).

So, taking the earlier PrintCo example, an alternative way of writing the user story would be like this:


As a PrintCo Customer
I want to be prompted to share my e-mail address with PrintCo
So that I can avoid those times when I need to print something but the ink is empty

Ah… but now we’re back where we started – where’s the business value? How do we get people to think about the business value first and then identify the roles and capabilities?

Let’s start again

Ideally, we want the benefit of driving the features from the business value and the increased understanding of what we’re implementing by understanding the user in our conversations around a user story.

 

To get to the right place, we need to start again with our example. Imagine that, instead of the above, we’d taken a different approach.

Recall that the business value or goal was:

Increase PrintCo printer cartridge sales by increasing our customer mailing list

Then, we could consider what behaviour we want to encourage and for whom. For example, we want the Customer to share their e-mail address with us online.

So, what will encourage that behaviour… What’s in it for our users? Into our business value statement, we “inject” the beginnings of a capability (or feature) that will help us deliver the value:


In order that PrintCo printer cartridge sales go up by growing the mailing list:
As a PrintCo Customer
I want <something>
So that an e-mail reminder helps me to avoid those times when I need to print something but the ink is empty

Now we’re ready to talk about the special <something> that we don’t currently have that will give the user the benefit they want:


In order that PrintCo printer cartridge sales go up by growing the mailing list:
As a PrintCo Customer
I want to be prompted for my e-mail address
So that an e-mail reminder can help me avoid those times when I need to print something but the ink is empty

We also want the Customer Services Rep to be encouraged to ask customers for their e-mail address when dealing with customers over the phone. So, we inject some more features:

In order that PrintCo printer cartridge sales go up by growing the mailing list:
  As a PrintCo Customer
  I want to be prompted for my e-mail address
  So that an e-mail reminder can help me avoid those times when
    I need to print something but the ink is empty

  As a PrintCo Customer Services Rep
  I need <something>
  So that I increase the points I get for e-mail captures, improving my
    position on the high-scores display

  As a PrintCo Customer Services Rep
  I need <something>
  So that I can see that the points I earn for e-mail captures affect my
    position on the high-scores display

And now we want to know what that special something is going to be for our Customer Services Rep:

In order that PrintCo printer cartridge sales go up by growing the mailing list:
  As a PrintCo Customer
  I want to be prompted for my e-mail address
  So that an e-mail reminder can help me avoid those times when I need
    to print something but the ink is empty

  As a PrintCo Customer Services Rep
  I need to be prompted to ask for the customer’s e-mail address
  So that I increase the points I get for e-mail captures, improving my
    position on the high-scores display

  As a PrintCo Customer Services Rep
  I need e-mail captures shown as one of the columns on the high-scores display
  So that I can see that the points I earn for e-mail captures affect my
    position on the high-scores display

And, if it is important that you capture the key stakeholder:


In order that the Marketing Manager grows PrintCo printer cartridge sales by growing the mailing list…

Or, you don’t need to even use ‘In order to’… you can word it any way you like


Goal: the Marketing Manager wants to grow PrintCo printer cartridge sales by growing the mailing list…

The most important thing here is not the wording. It’ that we find a way of keeping the business value in the conversation and when we’re talking about the capabilities, we focus on the user. What I’ve described is just one way of achieving that.

It’s like a “theme” for the stories

Themes have been suggested by many as a way of grouping user stories. In this case, the ‘In order to…’ can be thought of as a theme for the stories – i.e. the theme is described in terms of business value. Stories, described in terms of the user capability and incentive/context, are injected into the “theme” as we identify roles and capabilities that deliver the business value.

Notice, that I thought about the “As a…” and “So that…” aspects of the user story first and then summarised the capability, yet the order in which I expressed them remained as normal. As Rachel Davies once highlighted to me, just because we think of these things in one order, that may not be the best order for a discussion with the people who will implement it.

Another way of putting this is that the “As a… I want… So that…” is optimised for the conversation that helps the product owner(s) communicate what is required to the rest of the team, not for the order in which we generally discover the information.

In Summary

As you can see, Feature Injection doesn’t encourage you to simply move the “So that” to the beginning and reword it with “In order to”. I can see why people do that. One possible reason is because the stakeholder intent has been mashed into a user story, but that loses the purpose of a user story. I can also see why that happens, because there wasn’t an obvious place to think or talk about stakeholder intent. Business-value focused themes give us that.

I hope this helps clarify a little about Feature Injection and how it relates to user stories… but remember, this is only the tip of the Feature Injection iceberg. Actually it’s just one of the outcomes of Feature Injection. Watch this space for more.

Agile, BDD/ATDD, Software Development, Software Testing

Putting Cucumber where it’s not supposed to go will hurt!

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Today, I came across this post by Ryan Bigg where he talks of the pains he’s experienced with Cucumber.

Fortunately for Ryan, the outcome was a positive one, he ended up finding what appears to be a nice looking API for automating test-execution.

The experience he had with Cucumber, however, is a common one. Often teams start using Cucumber in an effort to reduce the need for programming skills when writing automated tests.

This isn’t the problem that Cucumber and other BDD tools are trying to solve and this is why so many teams who misuse it in this way experience difficulty and frustration.

BDD tools like Cucumber are designed to help teams and their customers arrive at a shared understanding of the problem they wish to solve (in terms of the user’s goals and tasks). It’s not really intended to describe the solution (i.e. step-by-step interactions with the GUI).

If your Cucumber scenarios have words such as “click” or “type” or mention field names and the like, it’s probable that you’re either:
a) Using Cucumber to automate test-execution (not what it was intended for) or
b) Trying to do BDD but writing the scenarios at too low a level of detail.

If you’re doing the latter (b)… then you may find the post I wrote over the weekend useful.

If what you’re doing is (a) then the post I wrote over the weekend might help you go down a path where automating your tests will make the transition to BDD that much easier.

If you really, really only want to automate test-execution then you might find that you’re putting Cucumber where it’s not supposed to go… and just so you know – that’s probably going to hurt 🙂

Agile, BDD/ATDD, Business Analysis, Software Development, Software Testing

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

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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 useful technique used in User-Centred Design (UCD) and Human Computer Interface (HCI) design is Task Analysis. There are three layers of detail often talked about in Task Analysis:

Goal: What we’re trying to achieve which has one or more…
Tasks: The high-level work-item that we complete to fulfil the goal, each having one or more…
Actions: The specific steps or interactions we execute to complete the task.

Previously, the terms used by Kevin, myself (and several others) were Goal->Activities->Tasks. From now on, I’m going to use the UCD/HCI/Task Analysis terms Goal->Task->Action. It’s exactly the same model – just with different labels at the three layers of detail.

What’s wrong with your average behaviour spec?
Let’s look at a common example… The calculator. For convenience, I’m going to borrow this one from the cucumber website[1].

Scenario: Add two numbers
Given I have entered 10 into the calculator
And I have entered 5 into the calculator
When I press add
Then the result should be 15 on the screen

[1]note: I’m using this example for convenience and simplicity. The value of the example on the cucumber website is to demonstrate how easy cucumber is to use and not necessarily as an exemplar feature spec

What would you say the scenario’s name and steps are representing? Goals and Tasks or Tasks and Actions?

I’d argue that adding two numbers is a task and the steps shown above are actions.

Instead, I try to write the spec (or test) with a scenario-specific goal and the steps as tasks.

Scenario: sum of two numbers
When I add 10 and 5
Then I should see the answer 15

I.e.:
Scenario: <A scenario specific goal>
Given <Something that needs to have happened or be true>
When <Some task I must do>
Then <Some way I know I've achieved my goal>

Another Typical Example
Let’s apply this to another typical example that might be closer to what some people are used to seeing:

Scenario: Search for the cucumber homepage
Given I am at http://google.com
When I enter "cucumber" into the search field
and click "Search"
Then the top result should say "Cucumber - Making BDD fun"

Again this is talking in terms of actions. As soon as I’m talking in terms of click, enter, type or other user-action, I know I’m going into too much detail. Instead, I write this:

Scenario: Find the Cucumber home page
When I search for "Cucumber"
Then the top result should say "Cucumber - Making BDD fun"

Why does it matter?
In the calculator example, the outcome the business is interested in for the first scenario is that we get the correct sum of two numbers. The steps in the scenario should help us arrive at a shared understanding of what ‘correct’ means. How we solve the problem of getting the numbers into the calculator and choosing the operator is a separate issue. That’s detail we can defer. It may be better to explore the specifics of the workflow using, sketches, conversation, wire-frames or by seeing and using our new calculator.

So, expressing our scenarios in terms of goals and tasks helps the delivery team and the business arrive at a shared understanding of the problem we’re trying to solve in that scenario.

Expressing the scenario in terms of the clicks, presses and even fields we’re typing into is focusing on a solution, not the problem we’re trying to solve.

But there’s another benefit to doing it this way…

A Practical Concern – Maintainability
The first calculator example follows reverse-polish notation for the sequence of actions:

  1. enter the first number
  2. enter the second number
  3. press add

If we put that detail in the scenarios, that workflow will be repeated everywhere – for addition, subtraction, division, multiplication… and anywhere any calculation is described.

What happens if the workflow for this calculator (such as the UI or API) changes from a reverse-polish notation to a more conventional workflow for a calculator? Like this:

  1. enter the first number
  2. press add
  3. enter the second number
  4. press equals

The correct answer hasn’t changed – i.e. the ‘business rule’ is the same – it’s just the sequence of actions has changed.

Now we have to go through all the feature files and update all the scenarios. In the case of our calculator that may only be a few files covering add, subtract, divide, multiply. For something larger and more complex this could be a lot of work.

Instead, putting this in the code of the step-definition means that this:

When ^I (add|subtract|divide|multiply) (.*) (?:and|from|by)? (.*) do |operator, first_number, second_number|
@calc = @calc ||= Calculator.new
@calc.enter first_number
@calc.enter second_number
@calc.send operator.to_sym
end

Would have to change to this:

When ^I (add|subtract|divide|multiply) (.*) (?:and|from|by)? (.*) do |operator, first_number, second_number|
@calc = @calc ||= Calculator.new
@calc.enter first_number
@calc.send operator.to_sym #moved up from the bottom
@calc.enter second_number
@calc.calculate #new action for the conventional calculator workflow
end

Nothing else would need to change – other than the product of course. By writing the steps as tasks, all of our feature files would still accurately illustrate the business rule even though the workflow of the interface (gui or api) has changed.

Taking your scenario-steps to task
So, taking this approach helps us to reduce our maintenance overheads. Putting the Actions inside the step definition makes our tests less brittle. When the workflow changes we only need to update our specs in one place – the step-definitions.

Of, perhaps, greater importance – by capturing the user’s scenario-specific goal as the scenario name and the tasks as the steps, the team are working towards a shared understanding of the part of the problem we’re trying to solve not a solution we might be prematurely settling upon. When rolled up with the broader context (expressed in the user-story and its other scenarios) it gives us a focus on solving the wider problem rather than biasing the solution.

Sometimes, at first, it’s hard to see how to express the scenario and is easier when people start by talking of clicks, presses and what they’re entering. And that’s ok. Maybe that’s where the team needs to start the conversation. Just because that’s where you start, ask “why are we doing those actions” a few times, and it doesn’t have to be where you end up.