BDD done easy – The Cotswold Way

The Cotswold Way is an Agile approach to business analysis, developed by Kent McDonald and myself.

Before you start, you need to identify whether you should be doing Business Analysis, Product Management or JFDI. Cynefin is a particularly useful tool to determine which approach.

The problem with BAs and Story writing in general is that most people think of it as an art form or a brainstorming activity. In fact there is a very simple directed process that Jenny Martin elegantly summarise as OOPSI (Outcome, Output, Process, Scenario, Input), and if you do it backwards, it ISPOO…

The process that I now refer to as the Cotswold Way is a further elaboration of the approach that Kent and I created called Feature Injection.

There are seven simple steps in the Cotswold Way:

1. Hunt the value. Start where ever people describe the problem/solution. Then work to the output and get them to sketch the reports that they need. They should be able to explain how and why they need the  output (report). This is the customer value which is not the same as the business value. (Hunt the value video)
2. Once you have the output, work backwards using the information smells process to identify the data and calculations you need to produce the report. This makes creating examples super easy. (For those who prefer videos to articles).
3. Now build the output in a spreadsheet using the model developed in step 2.
4. You can then work backwards to describe the behaviour of the system using the Given-When-Then format to define the process that populates the required data. (See here and then here )
5. Depending on the size and complexity of your organisation, you need to meet with either some lead developers/QAs or Architects/Lead Devs/Lead QAs to agree the architecture for the solution. Once you have done that, you can break down the solution into Epics and assign stories to the various components etc.
6. To break the solution into Epics, you now work backwards for each system to define the Given-When-Then. (Obviously if you are doing everything in a single component, you can ignore steps 5 & 6.)
7. Once you have your examples and Given-When-Then at the system levels, its a simple matter to slice them up into stories. David Evan’s article, and book are great for those who want to improve the stories they write.

This process takes HOURS rather than days.

Want to get started? Its simple, ask your user or business stakeholder to sketch the output they want rather than describe what they want to you.

Blog posts providing detailed examples of the steps above to follow.