Product owners create stories they believe are ready for development. Developers accept and then estimate stories that are not really ready to be started. This disconnect between being “ready” and “really ready” results in miscommunication and frustration. For example, story development can take much longer than original estimates because of the details and “sad paths” that were not expressed in the story. Ken Pugh describes how to turn vague acceptance criteria into specific acceptance tests. He explains how levels of detail in acceptance tests can help to more closely estimate the effort required by stories and shows how acceptance tests determine when stories are complete. With Ken, you’ll go through creating a “really really ready” story and examine when it should be created and who should participate.

Now that agile has gone mainstream, team-level development is not the only way organizations are implementing agile. Some senior management teams are trying to understand how they can implement agile-and lean-principles and practices from the top down. Jon Stahl demonstrates agile and lean techniques applied in a new way with certain constraints. With these techniques, your organization can begin its journey toward becoming an agile enterprise. However, before beginning, it is important that management “see the whole”-customers, projects, applications, people, leadership, financials, and standard work products-and start implementing and practicing the culture they wish to create. To help PMOs support this journey, Jon shares some guiding principles that can be applied to both agile and waterfall approaches.

Specification by Example is a collaborative approach for constructing executable requirements. Examples demonstrate how the system should operate through the eyes of its users and shows understanding of the application’s functions. Michael Connolly demonstrates the practical and easy-to-implement Specification by Example method which he uses to write user stories and acceptance criteria. This direct approach, in which requirements are elaborated via executable code, creates a solid communication bridge between non-technical and technical staff and managers within the organization. Eventually, these executable requirements become the basis for the system’s acceptance test suite. As a take away, Michael provides participants with a lightweight requirements document format and an acceptance criteria framework to help you translate written specifications into automation.

Acceptance Test-driven Development (ATDD) is a popular topic these days-everyone’s excited about the idea of writing tests prior to development. Yet many teams run into difficulties as they attempt to implement this practice. It’s all too easy to fall into the trap of writing acceptance tests that mostly specify keystrokes and button clicks. Join "Cheezy" Morgan as he offers an overview of ATDD while sharing his experiences and insights gained working with numerous teams implementing ATDD. "Cheezy" will take you on a journey of discovery, demonstrating practical techniques for writing ATDD tests that describe the essence of what they are specifying while hiding unnecessary details that obfuscate their meaning. Because ease of maintenance is a key to ATDD’s long-term ROI, "Cheezy" shows how to structure and layer test code to reduce brittleness and fragility so your ATDD test suite will retain its usefulness well into the future.