Specification by example
I was lucky enough to attend Gojko Adzic’s two day seminar “From user stories to acceptance test” If you get a chance to attend then Go!
As a teacher, Gojko is one of the few that understand the power of teaching. It is all to seldom that someone with great familiarity of the solutions they teach also understand and listens to any other and novel problems someone share. It is hard to to put your self in someone else’s shoes. But Gojko does this remarkably well.
The problems that Gojko solves among many is a) how to understand what the customer really need in contrast to what the customer says he needs and b) how to make that into solution that evolve in collaboration with the customer and any other stakeholder like the quality assurance (QA) department and developers.
Let me start with an example that we worked on. Say that a ticket vendor say “we want more customers use our mobile site.” During the seminar, Gojko gave us numerous exercises like this. What interests me wither this example is that it took the group together with Gojko under 30 minutes to identify that rather than focus on technical things and software, provide mobile customers with something like “joke of the day” would be the proper first step, easy and cheap. I see that as something that focus on point a above, understand the customer.
Gojko also gave numerous examples on how to mary that with any standard process like Agile and even waterfall. You can introduce his tools with any process. Software is not the point. Customer value is the point.
Read more about Gojko at twitter @gojkoadzic
Other who attended http://morgsterious.wordpress.com/2011/04/07/sucker-punch-to-my-agile-ego/
Gunnar Ahlberg
http://gunnarahlberg.com
email@gunnarahlberg.com
