Cucumber tests

Collectors of new media speakak (a word coined by the late Erik De Mauny as an equivalent to musak, but speech-based) will enjoy this long blog-post by Andrew Scott, BBC Head of Future Media for Radio and Music (whatever happened to Audio & Music ?)

Here are my highlights - I'm sure you will find your own.

After a series of facilitated brainstorming sessions with Product Management, Editorial and Technical teams we had produced a list of over 250 major features ("epics") based around three big bets of "Live", "Audio Discovery" and "Music". ... . Next we took a swing at how long it would take us. We used the model of tee shirt sizes to get a sense of the size for how long each "epic" might take.....,

.... we decided to go for a series of releases, one every three months. This was just enough of a "left to right" plan to get going knowing that:

• no plan survives first contact with the enemy 
• we had only high level estimates on the huge number of epics we had pulled together 
• we had no track record on which to base our estimates of velocity
• anyway the end date was over the horizon 

....We did a quick analysis of the primary user journeys and agreed with the stakeholders a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) which would allow us to launch so that we could then inspect and adapt based on empirical data. 


....As we did this we evolved a plan that involves a set of virtual scrum teams divided between New Product development and Business As Usual. This allows us to create cross functional scrum teams and move people between the teams without having to change their managers. 


.....We had a bit of trouble initially deciding where in the cycle the acceptance criteria should be created, either by the dev team in the sprint, or as part of the input pack to the sprint, but have settled on the business acceptance criteria being defined by the product management team in the input pack, and the QA folks writing the technical acceptance criteria (in the form of Cucumber tests) at the start of the sprint.