specifications

Books

User Stories are at the heart of agile delivery, yet creating user stories is a hard skill to master. I think everyone working in an agile project has battled with stories either too big or too small, too technical or without business value. Fifty Quick Ideas to Improve your User Stories by Gojko Adzic and David Evans provides solutions to many of these issues. This book helps readers to be more agile, instead of doing agile. It challenges ideas like using numbers for estimations and using velocity for capacity planning or for measuring value.

Fifty Quick Ideas to Improve your User Stories

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Quality, Specification by Example

I have been using Specification by Example (a.k.a BDD, ATDD) for the last couple of years. This has helped bridge the gap between technical people and business people. It has also helped ramp up new members on our team, since we have a living documentation of the system. This isn’t always easy and we’re continuously looking for ways of improving the structure of our BDD specification files.  There are some questions that help us spot improvement points:

  • How easy is to have an overview of what the product does?
  • What are the main business areas of the product?
  • How easy is to find a specification?
  • How easy is to find related specifications?
  • How does this feature relate to that feature?
  • If you just point a new joiner to the specifications folder, will she have a decent idea of what the system does?

In this blog post I hope to give you a few tips that might help answer some of these questions. These aren’t new ideas, but I find them pretty effective. Continue Reading

Books

Writing good tests is hard. Writing good specification is even harder. On my current project we treat test code with the same care we treat production code (which should be the norm on all projects), but we could still improve the readability, reliability and maintainability of our test suite.

With this in mind, Fifty Quick Ideas to Improve Your Tests by Gojko Adzic, David Evans and Tom Roden was the perfect choice for our book reading club. I’ve previously read Gojko’s Specification by Example, which really helped me better understand BDD and how to use it in practice, so I had high hopes for this book.

50 quick ideas to improve your tests

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