…and says to the barman, “I’m in the bar. I’m thirsty. I have £10.23 in my wallet.”
“Great,” says the barman. “What can I get you?”
The dev looks around. “When you take that glass and put it in front of that pump there,” he says, pointing at a pump, “you should be able to fill it full of beer.”
“Guess so,” the barman says. He picks up the glass and starts pouring the pint.
The dev points to a spot in front of him on the bar. “Given the glass is full of beer, when you put it there on the bar, you should ask me for £3.80,”
“Uhuh,” the barman says. He finishes pouring the pint and puts it in front of the dev.
“You should ask me for £3.80,” the dev says again. “If you don’t, I’m going to throw… um…” He looks around again.
“You know,” the barman suggests, “if you want to learn to use Cucumber you could just start by having an ordinary conversation first.”
Liz Keogh, lunivore 
Liz – Always enjoy your blog posts. I have recently become very interested in Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework; And your essays on using BDD have been very enlightening. From my developer perspective, I feel I have finally found an IT project management philosophy that provides a realistic and functional approach to the challenges of delivering software solutions in medium and large scale enterprises. Now I just need to get assigned to a project that uses it!
Brilliant!! I was recently pointed to this blog as I do a lot of Gherkin Scripting coaching. THE very first thing I always tell people is to have the conversation with the business about what the test objective is. Have them describe it and walk you through the users behavior. THEN go back and translate into Gherkin using as much of the conversation as possible. Eventually show the business your script to see if you captured everything correctly. Since the script is written in the language of the domain, and structured in a background-cause-effect way, it should be very easy for the them to read. In fact, if they have trouble reading anything it needs to be re-written; preferably by them. Now, off to read more of you BDD posts…