Specification by Example, a review in snippets

Tuesday, April 12th, 2011

I’ve just finished reading Specification by Example, a new book (currently in MEAP) by Gojko Adzic. Highly recommend to anyone involved in software creation (developers, testers, product owners, product managers, …). The book includes great insights into building the ‘right thing’ and the ‘thing right’, drawing on experiences from many successful software projects and teams. These projects each have dedicated chapters providing real insight into how these teams work and the steps they took to get there.

But you don’t have to trust my vague recommendations, I’ve included a few key examples from the book below:

Like cheap wine, long paper documentation ages rapidly and leaves you with a bad headache if you try to use it a year after it was created.

Working from the outputs ensures that there is always something that the business users can provide feedback on.

Understanding why something is needed, and who needs it, is crucial to evaluating a suggested solution.

Solve technical difficulties in the automation layer. Do not try to solve them in the test specifications.

We automate specifications to get fast feedback, but our primary goal should create executable specifications that are easily accessible and human-readable…

When each team worked to deliver a whole feature end to end, it was much easier for business users to collaborate with the team to specify the conditions of satisfaction and engage in illustrating them with examples.

The biggest benefit from this is getting us to talk together so that we have a mutual understanding of the requirements. That’s more important than test automation.

Long term value comes from living documentation

The first chapter is free to get you started.

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4 Comments to Specification by Example, a review in snippets

Savvas Andreas Moysidis
April 12, 2011

I’d also add one more I just happened to read:

“The culture by which programmers write code and testers test it has to change for Specification by Example to work.”

Ady Stokes
April 13, 2011

I like the fact that you have chosen to highlight key examples to show how a book that promotes key examples as a path to success works. Excellent!
But don’t forget that the key example of the largest benefit is the creation of living documentation. That is how you can ‘win big’ to coin a Gojko phrase.

Richard Paul
April 13, 2011

@Ady, thanks. I’ve added the title of the closing few pages to the examples, “Long term value comes from living documentation”.

Real-world data prove that Agile, BDD & co. work – lecture by G. Adzic « The Holy Java
April 14, 2011

[...] to using these methods. In his soon-to-be-published book, Specification by Example (download ch1, a review), he investigates what these projects and teams had in common, which was missing in the failed [...]

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