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Example Mapping – Steering the conversation

23 Nov, 2015
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People who are familiar with BDD and ATDD already know how useful the three amigos (product owner, tester and developer) session is for talking about what the system under development is supposed to do. But somehow these refinement sessions seem to drain the group’s energy. One of the problems I see is not having a clear structure for conversations.

Example Mapping is the brainchild of Matt Wynne. He created a simple technique that can steer the conversation into breaking down any product backlog items within 30 minutes.

The Three Amigos

Example Mapping is best used in so called Three Amigo Sessions. The purpose of this session is to create a common understanding of the requirements and a shared vocabulary across product owner and the rest of the team. During this session the product owner shares every user story by explaining the need for change in a product. It is essential that the conversation has multiple points of view. Testers and developers identify missing requirements or edge cases and are addressed by describing accepted behaviour, before a feature is considered ready for development.

In order to help you steer the conversations, here is a list of guidelines for Three Amigos Sessions:

  • Empathy: Make sure the team has the capability to help each other understand the requirements. Without empathy and the room for it, you are lost.
  • Common understanding of the domain: Make sure that the team uses the same vocabulary (digital of physical) and speaks the same domain language.
  • Think big, but act small: Make sure all user stories are small and ready enough to make impact
  • Rules and examples: Make sure every user story explains the specification with rules and scenarios / examples.

Example mapping

Basic ingredients for Example Mapping are curiosity and a pack of post-it notes containing the following colours:

  • Yellow for defining user story
  • Red for defining questions
  • Blue for defining rules
  • Green for defining examples

Using the following steps can help you steer the conversations towards accepted behaviour of the system under development:

  1. Understanding the problem
    Let the product owner start by writing down the user story on a yellow post-it note and have him explain the need for change in the product. The product owner should help the team understand the problem.
  2. Challenge the problem by asking questions
    Once the team has understood the problem, the team challenges the problem by asking questions. Collect all the questions by writing them down starting with “What if … ” on red post-it notes. Place them on the right side of the user story (yellow) post-it note. We will treat this post-it note as a ticket for a specific and focussed discussion.
  3. Identifying rules
    The key here is to identify rules for every given answer (steered from the red question post-it notes). Extract rules from the answers and write them down on a blue post-it note. Place them below the user story (yellow) post-it note. This basically describes the acceptance criteria of a user story. Make sure that every rule can be discussed separately. The single responsibility principle and separation of concerns should be applied.
  4. Describing situations with examples
    Once you have collected all the important rules of the user story, you collect all interesting situations / examples by writing them down on a green post-it note. Place them below the rule (blue) post-it note. Make sure that the team talks about examples focussed on one single rule. Steer the discussion by asking questions like: Have we reached the boundaries of the rule? What happens when the rule fails?

An example

example-mapping

Here in the given example above, the product owners requires a free shipping process. She wrote it down on a yellow post-it note. After collecting and answering questions, two rules were discussed and refined on blue post-it notes; shopping cart limit and the appearance of the free shipping banner on product pages. All further discussions were steered towards the appropriate rule. Two examples in the shopping cart limit were defined and one example for the free shipping banner on a green post-it notes. Besides steering the team in rule based discussions, the team also gets a clear overview of the scope for the first iteration of the requirement.

Getting everyone on the same page is the key to success here. Try it a couple of times and let me know how it went.
Read more about Example Mapping @ Cucumber blog.

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