Can BDD help in slicing complex story?

What is Behavior Driven Development?

Behavior Driven Development (BDD) is well known practice for collaboration and many organizations practice it to bridge gap between in product management and software development team.

BDD help in describing requirement in the form of feature file and scenarios. Scenarios further get describe in format of Given, When and Then. The language that mainly used in writing feature file is called is Gherkin. Gherkin language can be used to write feature file in more than 40 languages. Some of the important keywords of Gherkin mentioned below that will help in describing features and scenarios:-

Feature, Scenario, Given, When, Then, And, But, Background, Scenario Outline and Examples

How to write Feature file?

You can write feature file in notepad as well so basically there is no need to know any particular tools and below is format.

Feature: Search Flight

As a flyer I want to search available flight between Bangalore and Chennai So that I can book to travel on given date.

#above story/description is optional

Scenario: Search all available flight based on date, origin and destination

Given flyer enter travel date as “12/12/2016” and origin as “Bangalore and Destination as “Chennai”

When Click on Search button

Then search page should show all available flight

And option to book flight

When to write feature file?

If you are practicing Scrum then better to have it during product backlog refinement session else make it mandatory for requirement gathering.

What is complex story/requirement?

Take above example of flight search, this looks very simple but can it be deliver in 2 weeks of sprint? May not possible if you have to complete all work that has been mentioned in Definition of Done (DoD)? So how to slice it to have shippable product at the end of sprint?

Use BDD scenario like below to slice it. Now change scenario to search flights only for one airlines at time because connecting multiple sources may not be possible in one sprint and modify it like below.

Scenario: Search only Indigo flight based on date, origin and destination

Given flyer enter travel date as “12/12/2016” and origin as “Bangalore and Destination as “Chennai”

When Click on Search button

Then search page should show all available flight

And option to book flight

Scenario: Search only Spicejet flight based on date, origin and destination

Given flyer enter travel date as “12/12/2016” and origin as “Bangalore and Destination as “Chennai”

When Click on Search button

Then search page should show all available flight

And option to book flight

Scenario: Search only Jet Airways flight based on date, origin and destination

Given flyer enter travel date as “12/12/2016” and origin as “Bangalore and Destination as “Chennai”

When Click on Search button

Then search page should show all available flight

And option to book flight

Now team can decide to build only those scenario that can be delivered within one sprint and rest scenarios in upcoming sprints.

Above scenarios can also be further sliced like below if needed.

Scenario: One way flight of Indigo

Scenario: Return flight of Indigo

Scenario: Multiple location search for Indigo etc.

Hope it is useful and if you have further query then reach out to me on naveen.singh@leanpitch.com

Leanpitch provides the best scrum and agile training. We are leading provider of Certified Scrum Master (CSM), Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO), Certified Scrum Developer (CSD), Kanban , Test Driven Development (TDD), Behavior Driven Development (BDD) in Bangalore, Chennai, Mumbai, Pune, Delhi and Hyderabad. Visit our website to know more about Leanpitch Offering.