Richard Lawrence

Good user stories follow Bill Wake’s INVEST model. They’re Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimable, Small, and Testable. The small requirement drives us to split large stories. But the stories after splitting still have to follow the model.

Many new agile teams attempt to split stories by architectural layer: one story for the UI, another for the database, etc. This may satisfy small, but it fails at independent and valuable.

Over my years with agile, I’ve discovered nine patterns for splitting user stories into good, smaller stories. Read on »

Update: If you’ve just landed here, you could get the impression from this post that Cuke4Nuke doesn’t exist yet. It does. Check out this screencast showing what you can do with it as of early December 2009.

If you’ve read this blog for a while or talked with me about functional test tools, you’ve heard me talk about Cucumber. It’s my favorite ATDD tool because it’s so good at mapping stories and acceptance criteria to automated functional tests. Product Owners and BAs write acceptance criteria in natural language. Developers and testers unobtrusively automate tests for them. Anyone on the team can run the tests and see the current state of the system.

Here’s a simple example:

Feature: Google search
    In order to find things on the web
    As a user
    I want to search for web pages containing specific text
 
    Scenario: Load search page
        When I go to the search page
        Then I should be on the search page
 
    Scenario: Search
        Given I'm on the search page
        When I search for "richard lawrence"
        Then I should see "www.richardlawrence.info" in the results

This reads almost exactly as I teach Product Owners to specify acceptance criteria. But it’s not just text. It’s a potentially automated test.

A developer or tester can come along and automate this test like so in Ruby:

# assuming @google is an instance of a test DSL that wraps Watir, Selenium, etc. 
 
When /^I search for "(.*)"$/ do |query|
  @google.search_for query
end
 
Then /^I should see "(.*)" in the results$/ do |expected_text|
  assert { @google.results_contain? expected_text }
end
 
# etc...

Each of the Given/When/Then calls is a step definition. When there’s a matching line in a Cucumber test, the step definition gets executed.

Recently, support was added for step definitions in Java via a project called Cuke4Duke:

@When("I search for \"(*)\"")
public void search(String query) throws Exception
{
    google.searchFor(query);
}
 
@Then("I should see \"(*)\" in the results")
public void checkResults(String expectedUrl)
{
    assertThat(google.containsResult(expectedUrl), is(true));
}

Now, a Java team can use Cucumber without ever writing a line of Ruby.

Unfortunately, there’s nothing like this for .NET teams. Until now (or soon, anyway)…

AA-FTT and the Birth of Cuke4Nuke

Last month, I attended the Agile Alliance Functional Test Tool conference (AA-FTT for short). AA-FTT is an open space conference. I came with one goal: to get together with other people who want Cucumber for .NET and start making it happen. I wasn’t sure anyone else would be interested, so I was thrilled with the reaction.

Aslak Hellesøy introduced Cucumber for those in the group who hadn’t used it and then talked through the multiple language support he’d recently added to the tool. Then, we discussed ways to build .NET support. The obvious solution was to use IronRuby and Cucumber’s language support to handle C# step definitions. Matt Wynne downloaded the latest IronRuby and installed Cucumber on it. He kicked off a simple Cucumber example, and we waited. And waited. Some two minutes later, we had results from tests that take less than two seconds to run under the standard Ruby interpreter. In a process that values frequent, fast test runs, IronRuby was a non-starter. (If you want to try Cucumber under IronRuby, here are some instructions.)

So we discussed other options and settled on using a simple wire protocol for Cucumber to communicate to .NET out-of-process, similar to Slim in FitNesse. And here’s the best part: we started building it. Matt and I paired right there to start fleshing out the wire protocol (with Cucumber tests, naturally). Later in the week at Agile 2009, Matt and Aslak paired to build the Ruby side of the wire protocol, and Matt and I tackled the first bits of the .NET side. Last week, I got the skeleton of the .NET side working and up on GitHub. You can define simple steps in C#. Cucumber can ask the .NET wire server to tell it about the steps it has and to invoke them and return the pass/fail results.

About a week ago, Aslak announced the project on the Cucumber mailing list and recruited more contributors. Declan Whelan, Scott Ford, Åsmund Eldhuset, Anders Hammervold, Chris Kooken, and Steve Eley have already stepped up with ideas and code.

Getting Involed

How can you get involved? I’m glad you asked.

1. Join the mailing list.
2. Fork the GitHub repository and work on one of the features in the backlog.
3. Post a message to the mailing list to let us know what you’re working on. I’ll tag the ticket in the backlog with your GitHub username so we don’t duplicate effort. Prefix your message subject with [Cuke4Nuke].
4. Comment on tickets in the backlog.
5. Try using Cuke4Nuke as we develop it and give us feedback via the mailing list.
6. Shout encouragements in the comments here and on Twitter to let us know you care, even if you can’t contribute.

Bob Hartman and I are offering an Agile Product Management Boot Camp course March 9-10 in Denver. If you’re a product manager, product owner, business analyst or in any other product facing role in an agile (or soon-to-be agile) environment, this intense, hands-on course is a great opportunity for you to ensure that you’re helping your team maximize the value it delivers.

Read on for more details and a special 2-for-1 offer »

I’m experimenting with video for what is likely become a new series here. In these “Short Answers” posts, I’ll answer an agile question in about a minute. Use the comments to suggest questions you’d like to see in future Short Answers.

In this post, I answer the question, “What should I do when I discover in the middle of a sprint that a story is larger than we planned?” Several people have asked me this, and the answer is not, “Suck it up and work 80 hours to get everything done.”

Watch the video »

The Chief Engineer role in the Toyota Product Development System combines parts of the Product Owner, ScrumMaster, and senior technical team member roles from Scrum. In addition to leading the technical design of a new product and facilitating the work of the other engineers, the CE must deeply understand and care about what the customer values—he has ultimate responsibility for delivering value to the customer and for the resulting commercial success or failure of the product.

CEs have gone to amazing lengths to gain that deep understanding of the customer’s needs.

Read the rest of this entry »

As agile approaches the mainstream, it’s easy to lose sight of some of the core principles, especially this one:

Build projects around motivated individuals.
Give them the environment and support they need,
and trust them to get the job done.

If agile is to apply broadly, we can’t reserve it just for those projects that start with motivated individuals. We need to learn how to cultivate them.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m hosting a free seminar on Tuesday, November 11 from 1:00-2:30 PM in the Denver Tech Center area. Please join me there and spread the word to others who might be interested.

Here’s a brief description:

Read the rest of this entry »