My life as a BA

I recently found myself in the role of “BA” on a project. I’m usually involved in “quick starting” projects; driving out high level requirements, developing project / programme roadmaps and helping clients produce tangible visions of where they want to get to. For me, the story lifecycle ceases at the “as a… / I want to… so that…” It is still a placeholder for a conversation – we’ve not yet started to look at the detail. So It’s been good to drill deeper into the anatomy of a story. and so I found myself with the daunting task of writing “acceptance criteria”.

I’m not really a completer-finisher; I’m more into the big picture, so having to get into test detail has the potential to get painful. But this is where I am grateful to Dan North for his Behaviour Driven Development 101 before commencing the gig, and in particular around testing:

Given…
When…
Then…

Inspired. Suddenly the acceptance criteria are in language that I can understand. It becomes a joy to tease out criteria. And it is easier to say when enough is enough – it is after all about diminishing returns (hey Dan?) The value really shone out when a client was explaining complex rules around how some equity trading functionality would work. It was hard to understand what the requirement was. So I asked him to put himself in the shoes of the developers who will build the functionality. How will they know when they are finished? I scribbled out three columns – given / when / then. He then succinctly articulated the scenarios within this framework. What had been hard for him to explain, and even harder for me to comprehend suddenly became clear. Within a couple of minutes we had the story wrapped up were able to move on to the next story on our pile.