Did you know that there are types of requirements which are so uncertain that talking through them will just end in arguing about them? Or that some requirements are so well understood they’re simply boring? That some requirements are more likely to change than others? Would you like to be able to tell the difference, ask relevant questions and know when you’ve got enough understanding to start coding?
Would you like to be able to use your stakeholders’ time more effectively, and have them be truly engaged in conversations? How about using those conversations as a risk management tool? What if the conversations gave you more clarity on the big picture – the vision of the project, the stakeholders involved and their goals, and the capabilities being delivered?
What if you could use these ideas to help keep automated scenarios and tests minimal and maintainable, phrased in a language the business use?
Would you like to use these techniques beyond software – in everyday life, as a coaching tool, or to help find smaller personal goals that will give you more options for reaching the larger life-changing ones?
Behaviour-Driven Development uses examples of how a system should behave to explore the intended value and behaviour of that system, with a heavy focus on discovering uncertainty, uncovering risk and avoiding misunderstandings and premature commitments.
If you’re a developer wanting to learn Cucumber, I highly recommend Matt Wynne’s BDD Kickstart. If you come to my sessions, you might not see any code at all. Instead, I focus on helping people have effective conversations and a mindset that makes a difference across the entire team. As part of my BDD tutorials you’ll get an introduction to Cynefin and complexity thinking, Deliberate Discovery, Real Options, Feature Injection, and – of course – Behaviour-Driven Development. The tutorials are highly interactive, full of experiential exercises, and consistently highly rated by attendees, with unique workshops and conversations that you won’t get anywhere else.
If you like to have powerful conversations and help to create software that makes a difference, watch this space and my Twitter feed for upcoming tutorials near you, or get in touch if you’d like them run internally (whole teams welcome!). 2 and 3-day Agile, Lean and BDD courses are also available.
My next 1-day tutorial will be at Agile Island 2012, Reykjavik, on the 28th of November. There’s still time to sign up now!
Liz Keogh, lunivore 
Guess I was in Iceland a few weeks too early. (Not that I actually left the airport, but I would have if I’d been there at the right time!)
Thanks for the plug for BDD Kickstart Liz!
To clarify the intended audience of our training, the first day (BDD Fundamentals) is definitely aimed at everyone involved in software development. That first day is totally analogue, and is all about the principles of BDD: collaborative discovery, using structured conversations and examples to clarify and feed-back understanding, and how all of that fits into your existing agile process:
http://bddkickstart.com/details#fundamentals
Like you, I think it’s really important to have everyone on the team understand these core ideas. The second and third days of BDD Kickstart are where things start to get more technical:
http://bddkickstart.com/details#applied
We’re hoping most people will come along for all three days, but we’re leaving people the option to just book the BDD Fundamentals workshop if they’re most interested in the collaborative aspects of BDD.
I bet your tutorial will be great too – I can’t wait to come along to one 🙂
Yes, sorry Matt, I should have pointed out that you do also do full-team stuff. We do have some interesting differences though!
Finally, a course on BDD that targets the complexity at the heart of software development. I’ve attended Matt and Chris’ precursor to BDD Kickstart and felt an addendum covering Cynefin, Deliberate Discovery, Real Options, and Feature Injection was long overdue. Kudos.