Chapter 17. Songkick
Songkick is a UK-based startup that operates Songkick.com, a consumer website about live music. They are an interesting case study for two reasons. Unlike all the other companies featured in this book, they implemented Specification by Example while still at a startup phase, without having to deal with a large legacy system in the background. Also unlike most other projects covered in this book, user interaction is one of the most critical aspects of their product, and new features are developed with a strong emphasis on the user experience, based on observation of how users interact with the site.
The complexity of the system mostly comes from the number of user experience subtleties and the number of features they build to give users a rich experience. Songkick implemented Specification by Example to focus on delivering software that matters and to be able to grow their development team.
“As a startup you can’t afford to not be delivering value all the time,” says their CTO Phil Cowans. Here’s what he pointed to as the biggest benefits of SBE:
“Getting to what we actually intended to build quicker because we use the same language in the tests as we do when we decide what to build and go through the process of understanding our customers. That helps reduce communication issues. We aspire to never having a situation where developers turn around and say: What we built works; you just didn’t ask for the right thing.”