Gherkin for Business Analysts

30 Jun

Introduction

This article aims to provide an overview & guide to Gherkin. It should help BAs that have been asked to write scenarios …. work in BDD teams … write feature files … or create acceptance tests using the Given/When/Then format.

I’ll provide examples of the Gherkin syntax, why Gherkin is used & how it fits into BDD.

What is this Gherkin you speak of?

Gherkin is a language used to write acceptance tests. BA’s use Gherkin to specify how they want the system to behave in certain scenarios.

My personal definition of Gherkin is: “A business readable language used to express the system’s behaviour. The language can be understood by an automation tool called Cucumber.”

It’s a simple language. There are 10 key words (e.g. Given, When, Then). Because it’s a simple language, it’s understandable by the business. As well as being understandable by the business, Gherkin can be understood by an automation tool called Cucumber. That means Cucumber can interpret Gherkin and use it to drive automated tests. This links BA requirements to automated tests.

Below is an example of an acceptance test written in Gherkin. A BA may write the acceptance test independently, or as a team effort. Each scenario will test one example of the system’s behaviour:

The system’s behaviour needs to match the acceptance tests/scenarios. A feature may have many scenarios that need to pass. For example with a login component: in one scenario (incorrect password 3 times) a user should be locked out. In another scenario (incorrect password 2 times) a user should see a warning error message etc.

The 10 key words of Gherkin are:

  • Given
  • When
  • Then
  • And
  • But
  • Scenario
  • Feature
  • Background
  • Scenario Outline
  • Examples

We’ll go through each key word soon.

Why use Gherkin?

There are two key reasons to use Gherkin:

  1. Gherkin allows Business Analysts to document acceptance tests in a language developers, QA & the business can understand (i.e. the language of Gherkin). By having a common language to describe acceptance tests, it encourages collaboration and a common understanding of the tests being run.

2. Gherkin also links acceptance tests (GIVEN/WHEN/THEN) directly to automated tests. This is because Cucumber can understand Gherkin. Essentially it means if a BA changes an acceptance test – the developer’s underlying Cucumber test should fail and a red light should start flashing!! Therefore we can be confident that the system matches the BA’s specification. It’s an executable specification. It links requirements, tests and code together. It means the requirements are a living document that need to be kept up to date – otherwise automated tests will fail! Similarly, if the documentation changes and the code doesn’t change – a test will fail which is also good 🙂

As part of BDD, teams want to write many automated tests to improve their confidence in the product/releases. Teams want these tests to be understandable + valuable. Gherkin acceptance tests help with that!! Gherkin adds power to the acceptance tests being written by a BA – because they are directly executed as Cucumber automated tests.

Basic Syntax

Let’s go through the 10 key words.

  • Given, When, Then, Scenario

Above is a simple acceptance test. It uses 4 of the 10 key Gherkin words.

Given. This puts the system in a known state. It’s a set of key pre-conditions for a scenario (e.g. user has logged in, user has money in their account etc)

When. This is the key action a user will take. It’s the action that leads to an outcome

Then. This is the observable outcome. It’s what happens after the user makes that action

Scenario. This is used to describe the scenario & give it a title. The reason we do this is because a feature or user story will likely have multiple scenarios. Giving each scenario a title means people can understand what is being tested without having to read all the Given/When/Thens. A scenario title should be succinct. Some people follow “the Friends format” e.g. The one where …. the user has insufficient funds.

  • And

This is used when a scenario is more complicated. It can be used in association with Given, When, or Then. Best practice is to avoid having lots of Ands. Having lots of Ands can indicate that a scenario contains unnecessary information – or that a scenario is infact multiple scenarios.

Some people avoid using And in association with When … because this implies a scenario infact needs to be broken down into multiple scenarios. Typically you only want one when (i.e. action) per scenario.

  • But

Can be used in association with Then. It’s used to say something shouldn’t happen as an outcome. I’ve literally never used this one!!

  • Feature

Feature is used to give a title for the feature/piece of functionality. A feature contains lots of scenarios. For example “Sign in” might be a feature … or “push alerts” …. it’s the title of a piece of functionality.

The same way that scenarios have titles, feature have titles.

A feature file is a file that contains Acceptance Criteria (bullet points describing the rules / high level behaviour) & Scenarios (these are written in Gherkin; they test instances of the rules). Essentially it can be used to contain all the detail for a feature It’s usually stored on GitHub & its basically a text file with an extension of .feature.

  • Background

This sets the context for all scenarios below it. If you find that scenarios have common Given/Ands, Background can be used to eliminate the repetition.

Background is run before each of your scenarios. Scenarios can still have Given/When/Thens.

  • Scenario Outline / Examples

These are used together. They are used to combine a set of similar scenarios. Essentially you create a table and enter in values … rather than writing a scenario for each set of values. It can mean you have one scenario rather than 10 similar scenarios & makes the feature file much more readable.

  • Other stuff

Tags can be used to group acceptance tests. These aren’t part of Gherkin syntax, but are good practice. For example you can use @manual to identify manual acceptance tests. Or @javascript-disabled, @signed-in-users @edge-case @jira-103. A scenario can contain multiple tags – and you can create your own tags.

Steps are the name of anything below the scenario title. It’s the steps that a test will run through for a scenario (e.g. your Given / When / Then)

How it fits into BDD

As part of BDD the developer will write a test before the code. That means the test will initially fail, because the developer hasn’t write the code yet. It ensures each piece of functionality has automated test coverage

Tests should be behavioural in BDD. They should be a high level tests describing user functionality (i.e. not a unit test). Gherkin ensures behavioural tests are written.

Below is a typical BDD process:

The BA would write a feature file (includes bullet point ACs and Gherkin scenarios). This would be 3 Amigo’d with a developer/QA.

The developer would write step definitions for a scenario:

This would cause the test to fail because there is no code yet to pass the functionality. The developer writes code that means the system behaves as specified. The test passes.

Now if anyone changes the Gherkin scenario – it should result in the test failing.

Automated BDD tests reduce manual testing; this means we can have greater confidence when performing regular releases. By using Gherkin,those automated tests can be understandable by everyone. And the tests are hooked into the BA requirements.

Summary

Hopefully you can see the benefits of using Gherkin. I’ve tried to explain the what Gherkin is, why it’s used & the key syntax.

Hopefully the article provided a useful overview of Gherkin.

You should be able to take this little Gherkin quiz !!

Answers are below:

1 C

2 G

3 B

4 D

5 E

6 I

7 J

8 F

9 A

10 H

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Ouija estimation

3 May

Tired of story point estimation?

Want to reach consensus on your estimates.

Then try Ouija estimation!! And let the spirits (or ideomotor effect) guide you.

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Brian the BA learns about WIP limits

1 Apr

Brian cartoon - wip limit

Emojination cards

1 Feb

Tired of planning poker? Use some Emojination!! Cards free to download below:

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PDF cards

Powerpoint cards

Let me know your thoughts!!

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Brian the BA learns about the INVEST criteria

31 Jan

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Brian the BA – explains specification by example

29 Jan

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User Story Smells

24 Jan

Overview

“User story smells” is a term used by Mike Cohn in User Stories Applied. It describes anti-patterns that happen when writing user stories. Mike Cohn provided a number of story smells.

With 9 years Business Analysis experience, I decided to write my top 10 story smells. They are based on my observations. I’ve even created a game for people to try.

story-smells-game

 

Smell 1 – Everything in a Sprint should be written as a user story

This seems to happen with less experienced agile teams. They use the story format for everything in a Sprint (e.g. As a developer … I want … So that).

Why is it bad? User stories are written from the perspective of end users. They ensure what you build is anchored on a user need. Technical tasks can be sub-tasks of user stories (preferred option), or just tasks that need to be done to keep the lights on (e.g. renew a cert).

User stories are one type of item in the product backlog. Other types of item include: bugs, tasks, epics and spikes. Item can be in a Sprint without being user stories. Don’t spend time thinking how a technical sub-task can fit into the user story format. hammer-nail

 

Smell 2 – Stories should be sliced by technology layer, because that’s how our development team will approach them

Teams can have different groups of developers (e.g. front end and backend developers). There can be pressure to slice stories accordingly, because each story will be done by a different development team. Another reason is that breaking it down by technology layer removes a dependency on other developer teams. This is an artefact of how the development team is split.

The problem with this approach is that technology slides do not produce a valuable deliverable for the end user. The front end slice must plug into the backend to add value. Vertical slices of functionality are preferred to horizontal technology slices. Vertical slices are much more likely to be potentially shippable.

2-cake

 

Smell 3 – Stories don’t need acceptance criteria

This is a strange one – I’ve seen it before. The idea is that the BA/product team should not solutionise. They should present the user need/story to the developer and not come with a list of acceptance criteria/constraints.

The problem is – you need a clear outcome for a story. And there are often clear requirements from the business, or constraints to be considered. Just putting AS I … I WANT … SO THAT and leaving out the acceptance criteria means you won’t know when a ticket is done. It’s not specific enough.

Collaborative specifications, or collaborative specification reviews (e.g. 3 Amigos) work around this. Stories have to have acceptance criteria in order to be testable and closeable.

3-constained

 

Smell 4 – The product owner is a user

One of the most common smells. The product owner is a proxy for the user, but 9 times out of 10 they’re not the end user of the service.

The user in a user story has to be an end user of the system. They can be personas/types of user (e.g. admin, front line staff, loyal user etc). Product Owners, BAs, members of the dev team are not the end users.

Writing AS A product owner I WANT something SO THAT value isn’t a user story.

4-product-owner

 

Smell 5 – Acceptance criteria must specify how features look & behave

Some developers like lots of detail. And that’s OK … but generally speaking acceptance criteria specify behaviour (i.e. what the system does in certain scenarios). They don’t need to specify how it looks.

There can be times when describing how a feature looks is useful – or even necessary. Generally attaching a visual or link to a component library is sufficient.

A picture is worth a thousand words.

5-picture-worth-a-thousand-words

 

Smell 6 – System-wide NFRs should be written as NFRs

NFRs are tricky. There are obviously NFRs that affect the end user e.g. system availability. They can be convincingly been written in the user story format.

One problem with writing system-wide NFRs as user stories (e.g. availability, system backups) is that they cut across the entire system. It’s difficult to test these NFRs until the entire system is built. I prefer to have system wide NFRs either as “definition of done criteria” which get tested against each ticket, or as items for regression testing at the end of a release.

Story -specific NFRs might be written as ACs against a ticket (e.g. audit log for a reduction decision).

6-nfrs

 

Smell 7 – Specifying what the user wants is enough!

I’ve seen several people excluding the 3rd line of a user story. It’s the reason why the user wants something – the 3rd line helps us to understand why we’re doing the work.

The 3rd line of the user story (So that … ) can be driven from user research, or observations, or data analytics etc. Either way we need to understand the why before we start to solve the problem. At the minimum a story needs to include “So that”. This helps with prioritisation.

7-ask-why

 

Smell 8 – User stories should be incredibly detailed

User stories should specify the appropriate level of information. There’s a tendency from BAs, and sometimes from the development team, to try to put all the information they have into a ticket.

Having a ticket that is too detailed adds little value. It makes it likely that people will scan over the ticket and miss the most important information. An incredibly detailed ticket is not necessarily better than a less detailed ticket – it’s about having the appropriate level of information.

As a story is worked on it might be that more detail emerges. But a story should contain enough information for the team to develop and test it.

8-goldilocks

 

Smell 9 – User stories can depend on other stories in the Sprint

Ideally user stories should meet the INVEST criteria. That means each story should be independent.

Unless it’s agreed at Sprint planning & made visible on the ticket – all user stories should be independent. There may be cases where two dependent stories are brought into the same Sprint – however the goal should be that stories do not depend on other stories.

9-independent

 

Smell 10 – Stories should be very small

This is more for teams that are using Gherkin & TDD, however some teams aim to have very small user stories. Almost at the level of a handful of scenarios.

One advantage of smaller user stories is that we can track progress in a Sprint to a more granular level. But a note of caution – small user stories are essentially a grouping of scenarios. They can make the Sprint board less manageable and in themselves deliver very little value to a user. For very small stories it is difficult to make them to be independent and valuable.

10-ants

The game

Here’s a link to a game we created. It lists the 10 smells + 10 example bad user stories. See if you can match them: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1MXP3IMv0s56_FemJ8f_srWdZXphKiUIFpfVT0bLG_aY/edit?usp=sharing

It’s a great team exercise – with either a product or a BA team. It helps reiterate some of the key points above. And makes examples tangible.

Any smells I’ve missed? Enjoy!

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