Presenter: Gojko Adzic (Neuri)

Style: Presentation

Duration: 60 minutes

Specification workshops are intensive hands-on domain and scope exploration exercises. Organised at the start of every iteration and focused on the tasks ahead for that particular piece of work, they ensure that the implementation team, business stakeholders and domain experts build a consistent shared understanding of what the system should do, so that developers and testers have enough information to complete their work for the current iteration. They facilitate the discussion of examples, resolving issues, allowing and ensuring that people voice their concerns.

Specification workshops are one of the most recent additions to my personal craft toolbox, and I consider them as a key factor for a successful implementation of agile acceptance testing and example-driven development because they significantly improve the flow of information and ensure that incremental specifications are keeping the pace with development and testing in short iterations. In this presentation, I share my experiences with specification workshops from several recent projects, talk about how to run the workshops efficiently, how to incorporate them into an iteration flow and discuss problems that happen when workshops are not organised.

About The Presenter:

Gojko Adzic runs Neuri Ltd, a UK-based consultancy that helps companies build better software by introducing agile practices and tools and improving communication between software teams, stakeholders and clients. His programming story so far includes equity and energy trading, mobile positioning, e-commerce, betting and gaming and complex configuration management.

Gojko is the author of several popular printed and online guides on acceptance testing, including Bridging the communication gap (should be published before the conference), Test Driven .NET Development with Fitnesse and Getting Fit with .NET, and more than 200 articles about programming, operating systems, the Internet and new technologies published in various online and print magazines. He is the primary contributor to the DbFIT database testing library which is used by banks, insurance companies and bookmakers worldwide.