Comments on: Behaviour-driven stories

By: Michael Hanks

Michael Hanks — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 14:48:53 +0000

Great article. I can see similarities between the scenarios (Given, When, Then) and the operation contracts that Craig Larman wrote about in his ‘Applying UML and Patterns’ book – the Givens equate to pre-conditions and the Thens are the post-conditions of the event.

By: Dan North

Dan North — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 23:18:01 +0000

Good catch Eric!

Luckily the story was written in plain English so it was easy to see where the error was. I’ll leave it in there though – I’m sure there’s potential for a follow-up article about debugging scenarios.

By: Eric Krause

Eric Krause — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 19:54:52 +0000

I’ve been using your “What’s in a story” article as a guideline for doing my own user stories. I have also been spreading it around the office for people to read. My coworker pointed out that Scenario 2 gives the user $10.

By: Dan North

Dan North — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 22:16:48 +0000

Varying data is an interesting one. It implies there isn’t much incremental behaviour, just a set of inputs that need to match a set of outputs. I’m planning to come back to this in a later article.

By: Dan North

Dan North — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 22:14:43 +0000

Hi Frans.

This is intended to be the first in a series of articles describing exactly that: how the stories get translated into well-factored, working software, the interactions between the various participants, and how the process remains focused on delivering just what is required by the scenarios and nothing more. At least that’s the idea.

By: Ladan

Ladan — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 16:04:49 +0000

To begin with, I wasn’t sure if users would take to the style of the story in Given, when, Then format. I thought testers would love it. But having introduced the business to it I encountered no problems – the scenarios turn out rather neat, and easy to follow. Everyone likes them a lot – occasionally I find some people write a scenario like they are writing a Test Case (with varying data instead of varying logic). But overall my experience has been very positive! :)

By: Frans Bouma

Frans Bouma — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 11:25:33 +0000

What I have a problem with a bit is the translation phase from story to design. The thing is: take your example of the ATM scenario’s (how a good story should look like). It’s easy to follow, but the problem is that the different scenario’s all describe different characteristics which influence the design, however you run the risk of losing the overview of which characteristic elements are important (and thus drive your design) and which aren’t that important, or even which characteristics there are.

To me it somewhat appears to be like (bad metaphore up ahead ;)) a long list of “it should this” and “It shouldn’t do that”. You then could end up with a single class and a couple of methods with all the characteristics implemented, though that design isn’t that great.

So to me, the valuable aspect of having good stories (so you know you have analysed the domain properly) is great but should be placed in context a little more, like where to go from here? How to translate these stories in proper design? Which steps to follow? :)

By: Perryn Fowler

Perryn Fowler — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 06:44:49 +0000

Dan,

I think you are spot on in the article, the main problem I had with Use Cases was not so much what they were, but the way they were generally used. ie some sort of analyst wrote up a whole pile of them and then pushed off long before the developers arrived…

however, to me, another difference is that ( the way I do it) stories are smaller. In the example in your paper, I would have probably made each scenario in your ATM story a seperate Story….

By: Mats Helander

Mats Helander — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 21:23:13 +0000

Brilliant article! This BDD stuff is really starting to grow on me. While I haven’t had the chance to use it in a structured way in a project yet, I’m beginning to realize that it helps me in my thought process when thinking about business problems and communicating with the business people. Perhaps I’m doing “stealth BDD” :-P

/Mats