At Dovetail Software we often
learn more about customer service from our own software engineers than
we do from all the marketing and CRM sites
put together. Take a recent conversation – distributed across different
blogs of course – between Gary Sherman and Scott Bellware.
Gary was learning about Behavior Driven Development at the recent ALT.NET
conference in Austin, and blogged about understanding it as “a way of
using ubiquitous language to bridge the gap between the developers and
the business.”
“Joe Ocampo than gave an overview of nBehave. nBehave
allows you to represent your story in code, in the same format that
your business users express it. A developer sits down with a business
analyst, and they turn the story into code, following the standard
story pattern [...] you can create a document from these stories and
scenarios, and feed that document (written in human readable English)
back to the business for review and confirmation.” – BDD Discussion
This was the classic approach to BDD
as Gary heard it at the conference, but he noted, “Scott Bellware seems
to disagree with this approach, although I’m not sure why.” He invited
Scott to comment, but this being the age we live in, instead of leaving
a brief comment on someone else’s blog, Scott went off to his own blog
and penned a canonical dissertation.
Scott began by
calling an agile project a “negotiation of meaning”, and decried the
hardening of an intrinsically soft process by using helper tools that
are themselves too rigidly defined.
“Stories are mutable. The artifacts used to capture them should serve this quality of stories.” – Story Runners
Scott was saying that the presentation of BDD
that Gary heard focused too much on tools that attempt to pair the
logic of code with the logic of business language, in the same piece of
writing, like this:
logNotesStory = new Story(“log notes to a case”)
logNotesStory.AsA(customer support agent”)
.Iwant(to log notes to a case)
.SoThat(“everyone in the company has visibility to the current developments”)
-Taken from BDD Discussion
There’s a big problem with this approach, says Scott Bellware:
“It’s geek bias makes us believe that customers want to huddle up over a programmer/analyst’s requirements DSL
rather than having a focused conversation about the customer’s goals
and capturing those goals in a simple, lo-fi way that is more amenable
to the customer’s predispositions than ours.” – Story Runners
Gary Sherman is fond of quoting top marketers and customer-service people such as Seth Godin,
which tends to surprise the lay person who thinks an engineer is
oblivious to the sensitive issues of customer satisfaction. Fellow
engineer Scott Bellware proves himself equally sensitive with his
dissertation on story runners and what the business people really want.
Seth couldn’t have said it better.
