Comments on: Examples make it easy to spot inconsistencies

By: Progressive .NET Exchange @ YABoW @ trappers.tk

Progressive .NET Exchange @ YABoW @ trappers.tk — Fri, 22 May 2009 12:38:59 +0000

[...] conference had 2 concurrent tracks to choose from. On the first day I chose to go to Gojko Adzics sessions on specification by example and fitnesse. In this session Gojko presented the idea to use examples [...]

By: Robin Minto

Robin Minto — Sat, 16 May 2009 09:39:10 +0000

I enjoyed the workshop (good write-up too) – I think it worked remarkably well given that we formed teams that had never worked together to look at a relatively unknown domain, which highlights the benefits of the techniques.

I’ll be interested to see what comes out from this the next time I’m dealing with specification in my own problem domain.

It was also very valuable to be able to put examples from the morning session to use within Fitnesse in the afternoon. I had never actually used Fitnesse (perhaps illustrated by my description to Dylan!) and I found it useful to start using it with a non-trivial domain that was new but where I had some understanding from the morning’s examples. Also, it wasn’t my problem domain where I might be distracted. I could concentrate on the tool rather than the domain.

Thanks for both sessions, Gojko.

By: Markus Gärtner

Markus Gärtner — Wed, 13 May 2009 19:24:38 +0000

I’m still looking for a good example in my company. I had found one in our design documents, where similar issues were describes in tables already, but this particular condition was noted in textual form. The prose let out one particular type and I translated it into a table which directly grasped the idea of the requirements there. Unfortunately it was not a breakthrough for management buy-in, but I’ll be working on this in the next few months.

On the star picture: For a presentation at my company I was considering bringing up the five pointed star, write down the answers and before collecting the answers show up the 12 and 24 pointed stars from the book, ask to write down which star has 12 points and if each one was considering to adjust the number of points in the previous image. Too much for a presenation, but for an introduction workshop into Specification by Example useful since it gets the attention of the participants.

By: Lisa Crispin

Lisa Crispin — Tue, 12 May 2009 15:23:28 +0000

What great exercises! It sounds like the participants got a real-life experience of how examples can help, and how easy it can be to miss inconsistencies.

By: Dylan

Dylan — Tue, 12 May 2009 13:34:13 +0000

I thought the workshops were really interesting – especially the way that around 10:30 we were sat around getting *very* confused about the rules of blackjack and by 13:00 had actually eliminated a lot of the ambiguity, come up with a system for naming and classifying examples, and generally made some real progress in developing a shared understanding of the problem domain. I thought this was a really good example of how ‘real’ projects happen – and having the process distilled into four hours worked really well.

One idea. Next time you do the thing with the star, don’t put the picture up first and ask people to write down how many points it has. Why not ask everyone in the room to “draw a star with ten points” – and see how many different shapes you get? It’d make the same point about ambiguity but avoid the “trick answers” like including the four corners of the display, etc… Just an idea

Yesterday morning I didn’t know what acceptance testing was and I’d never heard of Fitnesse (although I liked Robin Minto’s description of Fitnesse as “a wiki with red and green bits”) Now I have a much better idea of what it is, why it’s useful, and when it might be usefully applied. Good stuff all round.