5 How to get the business involved

 

This chapter covers

  • How to learn from successful adopters of BDD
  • Techniques to encourage the business to engage with BDD
  • How to address the common barriers to BDD adoption

We have already explained how the most important element of Behavior Driven Development is collaboration. Collaboration means that team members with different roles work together to deliver working software. A team will include both the business (product owners, project sponsors, business analysts, etc.) and technical personnel (such as developers, testers, UX experts and operation staff). It’s a common mistake to focus just on collaboration between delivery team members.

In this chapter we would like to share our experiences of how to get business representatives fully involved in the BDD approach and what kind of challenges they might face. You’ll see that we believe the key to successfully adopting BDD is to demonstrate to the business the value of collaborating with the delivery team. There is no fixed recipe for this – you’ll need to develop and refine your strategy depending on your project context.

“The proof of the pudding is in the eating” – in the end, seeing the immense value that results from practicing real collaboration is the only way to demonstrate that BDD can work in your context. Our aim is to give your team enough enthusiasm to give BDD a try.

5.1 Learn from your peers

The key benefits typically attributed to BDD are:

5.2 The one where the business is not involved

5.3 BDD is for solving problems

5.3.1 The product owner is overloaded

5.3.2 Production issues are common

5.3.3 It is hard to get the product to a deliverable state

5.3.4 It is hard to get customers engaged with the product

5.3.5 Deadlines are often missed

5.3.6 Hard to get a good overview of the progress

5.3.7 Introduction of new features causing unwanted side-effects

5.3.8 Not being able to react fast enough to market changes

5.3.9 “Bug vs. feature” debates within the team

5.3.10 Changes regularly requested at the Sprint/feature reviews

5.3.11 But my product owner never reads the scenarios

5.4 Summary