Challenges in BDD Scenarios & coming up with feature files

How many of you have challenges writing BDD scenarios?
What kind of challenges do you face? Have you been able
to have the conversations with stakeholders to come up
with feature files?

Let’s discuss!

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What I find challenging about writing scenarios is to find the right level of abstraction.
I’m on the opinion that the team should write the scenarios. We try to find the scenarios while discussing the stories in a 3 Amigo session. The idea is to just write down in a format like “The One where the customer tries to cancel the order while it is transferred to the transport vehicle” and do the formulation afterwards, because this takes some time and not everybody from the meeting must be involved with this task of formulation. Of course the scenarios should be reviewed after creation.
A challenge that we just face is the question how knowledge is shared with team members which were not part of the 3 Amigos meeting.

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Three amigos is great. But low level of abstraction, and reviewing later for higher level of abstraction breaks the conversation-style of coming up with better scenarios.

I know that the business owner will be very busy, so they can’t spend much time on conversations, but the process mandates that the feature files be written through conversations.

Especially, testers would have several scenarios in their mind, and they will keep pounding the dev. and the product owner as to how the software should behave in each of the scenario. To what level of abstraction should this be managed?

GUI is a completely tough ball game in terms of abstraction. I have seen developers writing very detailed feature files specifying each and every aspect of GUI, and eventually the feature files become too cumbersome to maintain.

Just sharing the thoughts.

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Separating the 3 Amigos session from the formulation phase should not mean that we change the level of abstraction. We want to use the time together to find the scenarios and to discuss them together and to build the same understanding. One scenario from one member often leads to another interesting one (maybe edge case) from another participant of the meeting.
The PO is must-have member for the meeting. The formulation part is just separated because good formulation needs some time.

For this topic I can recommend the books “Discovery” and “Formulation” from “The BDD books” line, written by Gáspár Nagy and Seb Rose. They give good insides in the different phases of the process

Feature files describing the detailed aspect of the GUI seem like they ignore the rule that scenarios should not describe the ui but business behaviour. The more “technical” we are the more we seem to tend to write some kind of more “technical” driven scenarios from my experience. This is also a matter of your products context.

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Good pointers. Also, I’m trying to get Gaspar speak in MoT, Bangalore Meetup in 2021. Let’s see.

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Sounds like it would be worth to start a trip to Bangalore :slight_smile:

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Everything online these days! You could join us from here:

Nevertheless, you are always welcome to visit Bangalore anytime! :slight_smile:

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