Resolving resistance in doing Specification By Example

[Zico Gupta]

Hello Gojko,
I'm a big fan of you and it's a privilege for me to ask something directly to you.

I'm acting as Scrum Master in a team of 7 and I am finding it difficult to induce specification by example in developer's mind. Since all scenarios are not available before development begins, sometimes it results in more number of bugs after the user story is done and released.

From the management side, we are not directly exposed to interact with the customer and have to look forward to Product Owner or architect to know about requirements and sometime some information is lost in this flow. Also, we have to create our own data for testing most of the time.


Could you please suggest some solution for the above mentioned problems?

Thanks & Regards,
Debayan

[Gojko Adzic]

Zico Gupta wrote:
I'm acting as Scrum Master in a team of 7 and I am finding it difficult to induce specification by example in developer's mind. Since all scenarios are not available before development begins, sometimes it results in more number of bugs after the user story is done and released.

what is preventing you from getting to the customers and starting with their examples, then extending that? Can the product owner get realistic examples from customers?

--
Gojko Adzic
http://gojko.net @gojkoadzic [phone]

[Raja Pal]

Hi Zico,
As an agile coach having helped several teams overcome to such problems I'll share what has been our expereince. These problem of unreachable enduser/customer is normally in the managements mind because they find the team unreliable/immature, if you can help the management get that trust by speaking to them and explaining the benefits of direct customer interaction then it might help. If the Product Owner(ROI incharge) however is not getting you the right data/info/user story then may be you can suggest the Product Owner to undergo a Scrum PO training. Hope this helps.

[Zico Gupta]

Hello Gojko,
The problem is the product owner himself is not well versed with the complete product, on the other hand, management is not ready to expose team members directly to the customers. We only get a chance to interact directly when a bug arrives.

Also, if you please answer my first question, it'll be really helpful.

Thanks & Regards,
Debayan

[Gojko Adzic]

Zico Gupta wrote:Hello Gojko,
The problem is the product owner himself is not well versed with the complete product, on the other hand, management is not ready to expose team members directly to the customers. We only get a chance to interact directly when a bug arrives.

Several teams I interviewed for Specification by Example got their product owners to supply initial examples directly from customers/business users. the team then worked with the PO to clarify more examples and the PO would get that confirmed by the customers/business users after a spec workshop. In such cases you might want to run the spec workshop a few days before the iteration starts so that the PO has time to chase users and clarify open questions.