Thanks very much for inviting me to speak about agile acceptance testing and specification by example at HSBC today. It was great to chat to you and I must say that your video-conferencing system is really impressive. As promised, here are the slides and links from the presentation.
Dan North and I met up today and decided to do a joint workshop on behaviour-driven development and specification by example. The workshop will be very practical, focused around the following topics:
How to communicate effectively with project stakeholders
Value of specification by example
How to write good scenarios
How to spot problems with scenarios and examples and how to fix them
How to integrate BDD and specification by example into your development process and organisation
Focusing on writing software that really matters
Managing code after it is released, using examples and scenarios as live documentation
This will be a unique opportunity to learn BDD and specification by example straight from the horse’s mouth. We’re ironing out the final details and I’ll publish them early next week. For now, I can only say that the workshop will take place in central London mid December this year and that the number of places will be very limited (definitely not more than 30), so if this sounds interesting send me an e-mail or ping me on twitter and I’ll keep you posted.
I organised a workshop on Specification by Example yesterday at the Progressive .NET mini-conference in London, demonstrating how realistic examples are a very effective tool to flush out incorrect assumed rules and point to real business rules in software requirements. Continue Reading »
The book is about improving communication between customers, business analysts, developers and testers on software projects, especially by using specification by example and agile acceptance testing. It is primarily intended for product owners, business analysts, software developers and testers who want to learn about agile acceptance testing and implement it. It should also prove to be interesting to project managers working on software projects, both within the implementation team and on the customer side. It is intended both for people already working with agile processes and for people who wish to migrate to them.
I’m really enthusiastic about this book because I think that it fills an important void in the market today, helping different roles look at specification by example and agile acceptance testing from their perspective and figure out how to cooperate better as a team. The book is intentionally not very technical so that business people can read and understand it. It got some really nice reviews, so I encourage you to have a look at it by downloading the sample chapters and checking out the table of contents.
The book is (again) published by my company using a print-on-demand system. It should soon appear on all major online bookshops and will hopefully be picked up by traditional bookstores as well. It is immediately available online from my new acceptance testing info portal. You can order the paperback (they will start shipping on Jan 5th) or download the PDF immediately.
One of the key things missing from a lot of places where people try to implement agile acceptance testing is working collaboratively on examples. Although this sounds as a minor issue, in fact it is one of the core practices. If it is missing, there is no way to get the full benefits of acceptance testing and teams often get disillusioned with the whole idea. Ian Cooper recently wrote about his experiences before and after introducing the workshop, concluding that “this seems to have removed a lot of the pain”. Continue Reading »
, my book (also see the PDF edition)
by Gary Klein
by Mary and Tom Poppendieck
by Gerald Weinberg and Donald C. Gause
I organised a workshop on Specification by Example yesterday at the 
I just ordered the final print proof copy of my new book, 
One of the key things missing from a lot of places where people try to implement 
