“Inclusion” The BDD principle we call “The Three Amigoes”

There was an amazing panel discussion at Cukeup yesterday. If you are interested in BDD I would recommend watching it when it is posted. For me, the main take aways were:

1. BDD is a centered community rather than a bounded community. This means that there is no division between those that do BDD and those that do not. Instead, teams are closer to the principle or further away.
2. The BDD principles should be defined as a set of examples.

This is a great opportunity to explain “Break the Model” in Feature Injection.

We start by spotting an example. e.g. The Three Amigoes. We then create an examplar:

GIVEN we can identify all of the users of an investment

AND we can access those users

AND we can confirm the output they require

AND we can confirm their needs for the output

AND we can confirm the value to the business by satisfying the users needs

WHEN we prepare our set of examples

THEN The Business Analyst, The Tester and the Developer should create the examples together

AND They should ask the users to confirm their correctness.

This one example is our model, so we can easily spot another example that breaks this model.

GIVEN we cannot identify all of the users of an investment

AND we cannot access those users

WHEN we prepare our set of examples

THEN The Product Manager, The UX Designer, The UX Researcher, The Big Data Analyst, The Business Analyst, The Tester and the Developer should create the examples together

AND They will confirm the examples using usability tests and MVT.

We now have two examples and we can abstract out a model. The purpose of the model (Olaf)  is NOT to define the principle. The purpose of the model is to help us spot other examples.

The model we abstract is “Include someone representing every aspect of the the development process”

We now have another example:

GIVEN we are a start up containing a product manager and a developer only

AND we have customers prepared to work with us

WHEN we create examples

THEN the product manager, the developer and a customer should create an example together

AND we test the examples using usability and MVT.

We now abstract a new model “Inclusion”. The principle of BDD is that it is better to include as many people in the creation of examples as possible. Its a common sense thing though. Too many people in a single workshop can be disruptive and counter-productive. Those people not in the workshop should be engaged to confirm the correctness of the examples, and be encouraged to find additional examples that break the model.

Now that we have a model called “inclusion”, it helps us to focus on trying to find examples where someone should  be excluded from the process of example creation.

“Inclusion” is a useful name for the Olf/Model/Abstraction. It is not a good name for the principle which is “The Three Amigoes” which refers to the first (founding) example in the principle.

The model does not define the principle. The examples do. We can add to the examples and as we do, the model/abstraction will change. The principle name will stay the same.

I’m looking forward to seeing the “BDD by Example” wiki.