Requirements

Today I stumbled across Behavior-Driven Development-BDD for the first time. It’s an evolution of the thinking behind Test-Driven Development-TDD. The theory is intriguing. I like the focus on behaviors rather than tests. It appears to be more user experience and results oriented.

At its core are three principles which really ring true with me:

1. Business and Technology should refer to the same system in the same way
2. Any system should have an identified, verifiable value to the business
3. Up-front analysis, design and planning all have a diminishing return

But the reason I bring this up is because of the “story” model they present for stating requirements:

Model

As a Role
I want Feature
So that Benefit

Example

As a savings account holder
I want to transfer money from my savings account to my checking account
So that I can get cash easily from an ATM

Most requirements or feature requests only have the “what” portion of that statement. How cool would it be to keep the “who” and the “why” right next to the “what” of each requirement?

I don’t know if the cost/benefit is there for this approach. Again, I just read some articles today. It could take a lot of time to gather all of a project’s requirements this way. But there would definitely be some value. Think of the inevitable prioritization discussions. Which feature is most important? I’m certain that keeping the who and why as a part of those discussions would lead to better decisions.

I’m a big Ruby on Rails fan. Because of this BDD reading, I finally took a look at RSpec, a BDD framework for Ruby. I’m equally intrigued here and intend to try this out on my current project.

They expand on the “story” model adding scenarios.

Story: transfer from savings to checking account
  As a savings account holder
  I want to transfer money from my savings account to my checking account
  So that I can get cash easily from an ATM

  Scenario: savings account has sufficient funds
    Given my savings account balance is $100
    And my checking account balance is $10
    When I transfer $20 from savings to checking
    Then my savings account balance should be $80
    And my checking account balance should be $30

  Scenario: savings account has insufficient funds
    Given my savings account balance is $50
    And my checking account balance is $10
    When I transfer $60 from savings to checking
    Then my savings account balance should be $50
    And my checking account balance should be $10

RSpec then allows you to build this story and scenarios right into the actual code. The RSpec site has more on that.

Again, would it be valuable and useful to gather requirements like this prior to coding? We have to get at least some of this information before we can complete this feature. This just seems like an interesting way to document that information. For what its worth, it’s got me thinking new thoughts.

posted by tadd on Wednesday, Jan 23, 2008

Leopard: First Impressions

I received our family edition of Leopard last Friday (as promised by the online Apple store) and promptly installed it on three of our computers. Here are my initial thoughts after 3 days of Leopard in the house. As always first impressions are subject to change without notice as more experience, information, and software updates are available.

• New Parental Controls: For my home network with multiple Macs and children ranging in ages from 10 to 18 this is by far my favorite new feature. Leopard includes user account-based web filtering, scheduled on and off times, and activity logging; all built-in. It also includes remote access to the parental controls, so I can check logs and configure settings on other computers from my computer. Finally, I can now remotely connect and see the live screen (Capture Screen) of any computer as well; again, built-in. I let the kids know of my new found parental superpowers and surprisingly didn’t get any resistance. My junior in high school said, “Oh, its like at school in my computer class.” This is good news for parents. Thank you Apple for putting so much effort into this!

• Quick View: This looks to be a huge time saver. It so fast and seems to have support for all of my documents. In my work I do little document editing, but a lot of document reading. This alone will likely be the biggest productivity gainer for me personally.
• Stacks: I dig these. Keeps my web downloads from cluttering my desktop and makes it easier for me to get to my Applications that I don’t want on my dock.
• Compatibility: So far all of our major apps seem to be running fine. Very nice.
• Mail: I think the To Dos and Notes integration will prove to be useful. The RSS integration in Mail certainly won’t replace Bloglines for me, but I intend to use this for RSS feeds on our internal network at work. That will be useful.
• App launching using Spotlight: I think the app launching in spotlight is now good enough for me to finally uninstall quicksilver. Always nice to run less. But the indexing issue (see below) may mess this up. We’ll see.
• New Finder: Sharing files between computers on previous OS X versions has completely baffled my family. This was something that was very easy for them to do in Windows, but the interface in OS X has always been pretty obtuse. I think putting the other network computers in the sidebar in Finder and the other interface changes there will fix this. I think it might actually be easier than Windows finally. Time will tell on this one.
• Bullets in Mail: Such a simple thing, but finally!
• Handling bad network connections: So far, Finder seems to be much better at handling disappearing network connections. The long hangs and lock ups of previous versions appear to be gone.

• Cover Flow in Finder: I’m not quite getting this one. Seems to be pure eye candy with little utility.
• Spaces: While this virtual screen implementation is hands down the best I’ve ever seen, I’m still not sure I’ll ever find real use of virtual screens.
• Stationery in Mail: The templates are all too “fru-fru” for me. It’d be nice to have a few that were appropriate for business scenarios, no? This app does connect to Exchange my friends.
• Animated backgrounds in iChat and Photo Booth: These are certainly fun and cool for sure, but I’m not sure I’ll ever use them except in demos. Maybe I’m just no fun anymore. :)

• No vertical preview pane in Mail: It is almost 2008. It is way past time for Mail to have a vertical preview pane. Horizontal preview panes feel so 1990’s. I’ll have to keep using an extension for that I guess.
• Changed 802.1X Wireless Network Settings: The upgrade process changed my 802.1X settings and broke my ability to connect to our wireless network at work. I had to change the settings back to get it working again. The interface to do that completely changed (for the better actually), but initially I was pretty lost. Got it working though, but shouldn’t have had to waste time figuring that out.
• Built-in VPN access no workie yet: I think I might be able to get this working with some help from our network guys, but no luck on my own. I had to install an updated Cisco VPN client to get VPN working. But I did get Cisco working at least. I’m hoping to get rid of the Cisco client, we’ll see.
• Spotlight Indexing: Spotlight seems to be indexing a lot and when its indexing you can’t use the feature. It can also slow down the computer a little. And worse, there’s no way to interrupt the indexing once its started or control when and how it starts and stops. This was a problem even after computers had been left on overnight. I think this needs some polishing.

• Safari crashes when accessing Sharepoint: Our team has a Sharepoint site we run internally and Safari crashes dead every time I try to access it. I don’t care how lame Sharepoint is, Safari should never ever allow a website to crash it. This is just one more thing that will get in the way of our team using Sharepoint more often.
• No Airport Extreme support in Time Machine: This is the biggest disappointment for me in Leopard. Having an external hard drive for every laptop in our home just doesn’t make sense. We need a network storage solution. I was hoping to replace the rsync scripts I have running on our family laptops with Time Machine. Airport Extreme support was in the beta and developer builds, but apparently must of not been ship-ready and had to be cut quite late. I really hope this gets worked out and released in updates soon. I hope you all with your external hard drives enjoy Time Machine. I’m going to have a wait a bit more, I guess.

• Updated built-in Apache and PHP (why don’t they include mySQL so they can have the entire MAMP stack?)
• Built-in ruby on rails
• Dashcode
• Ruby support for building Cocoa apps in XCode
• HTML/CSS editing support in XCode
• New Interface Builder in XCode
• Screen sharing in iChat

posted by tadd on Monday, Oct 29, 2007