Writing Great Specifications

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1. afandianMar 2023
   Not only that, but it enables product owners to actually express the features they want, in such a way as they can be implemented. Without that devs and product owners tend to second-guess each other.

   I've recently introduced Cucumber and it's been an incredibly useful framework for collaborating between developers and product owners. I'd recommend "Writing Great Specifications" by Kamil Nicieja.

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2. turtleyachtNov 2022
   It can be difficult to wrangle Gherkin. I've tried to use "Writing Great Specifications" as a kind of guide. Reducing specs to (mostly) one each of Given, When, and Then seems to reduce UI steps.

   Having agnostic specs is nice if the team moves from web app to, say, React Native: should still be the same feature set.

   The con is QA looking for step-by-step test instructions have to look elsewhere (at the "code"). And, I still haven't seen a real example of QA, PM, and dev working together to write Gherkin :)

   Tooling can help for some warts. Gherkin is line-oriented, so a parser is easier to write. Using ex or ed, one can generate a clickable webpage of specs to kick off a test.

   Interestingly, the book above recommends DDD as a way to organize test specs. One suggested exercise is to highlight words from a spec and label them as one domain or another, and determine the core domain versus secondary ones.

   Of course, one chapter or a few cannot describe DDD, but interesting to see that decomposition.

   Other than Cucumber, what do you use for BDD?

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3. tmalyFeb 2018
   I think you have to formalize the process first. If everyone in the company does something different every time a requirements doc is written, it is just chaos. Steli and Hiten had a great podcast episode on this recently.

   As part of that process, you will need tools to capture the documents and track changes to them. Consider something like Confluence or another type of wiki. You will also need good training. If you expect people across the company to use the process, you have to make it accessible and easy for them to learn.

   A book I would recommend that I am working through now is Writing Great Specifications by Bicieja

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