17 Dramatis personae patterns for clear naming of concepts
This chapter covers
- Defining specific concepts and entities using personas and persona definitions
- Approaches for including persona definitions within a feature file
- Approaches for placing persona definitions outside any feature file
- Techniques for specifying and validating user-facing messages and text
- The role of domain experts in the creation of persona definitions
- Controlling the number of persona definitions needed, by creating persona definition templates
The patterns described in this chapter allow us to clearly identify the many business concepts that are needed to illustrate desired application behavior. Whether we’re referring to a user-facing error message or a complex set of structured data, we need an unambiguous way to identify each business concept.
Dramatis personae is the term used in film, theatre, and literature to describe a list of all the important characters that are featured in the work. Having descriptive names for arbitrarily complicated business concepts is essential at every stage of the product’s life. The names, along with descriptions of their relevance, are recorded in the product glossary (see chapter 10), which is easily accessible to all stakeholders.
NOTE
In the arts, the list of important characters is called by the Latin name, dramatis personae, which is where this chapter’s title comes from. In modern English, it’s more usual for the plural of persona to be personas.