Shared understanding
Shared understanding is a common interpretation among people of relevant information, context, assumptions, expectations, goals, or decisions.
Collaborative Software Design: How to facilitate domain modeling decisions
A shared understanding is a common interpretation of relevant context, assumptions, concerns, and decisions among participating people.
- How it is used
- Aligns stakeholders and software teams around business problems and design decisions through collaborative modeling.
- How deep it goes
- Defines the goal and gives visualization, participation, sensemaking, and documentation practices without prescribing a single modeling process.
- Examples
- Uses BigScreen hand-offs, EventStorming for movie extensions, and a standard-product-versus-custom-solution polarity exercise.
- What you can do after
- Apply it via collaborative modeling to make assumptions explicit, align perspectives, and support sustainable design decisions.
BDD in Action, Second Edition
A common and sufficiently detailed interpretation of requirements, behavior, and value held by the people collaborating on a product.
- How it is used
- Aligns stakeholders and delivery teams on valuable features through conversations about business goals, rules, and behavior.
- How deep it goes
- Works through ambiguous password criteria and a conversation-to-scenario process; defers Java automation.
- Examples
- Uses overseas-transfer design questions and password-strength cases to expose assumptions that an initial feature request or acceptance criteria leave unresolved.
- What you can do after
- Practice/perform cross-functional example conversations, clarify expected behavior, and express agreed examples as scenarios suitable for automation.
Read how BDD in Action, Second Edition explains shared understanding →
Related concepts
- collaborative discovery and modelingproduced by · Collaborative discovery and modeling is a group technique in which stakeholders jointly create and refine representations to establish shared understanding of a domain or system.
- expectation managementproduced by · Expectation management is the practice of clarifying, communicating, aligning, and adjusting expectations about capabilities, responsibilities, processes, and outcomes.
- discovery workshopproduced by · A collaborative, structured session in which participants explore and refine user needs, problems, domain concepts, or software requirements.
- specificationproduced by · A specification is a formal or informal description of the required or intended behavior, properties, interfaces, or constraints of a system or component.
- scenariocontrasts with · A scenario is a concrete description of a situation or conditions, often including actions and expected or possible outcomes, for analysis or evaluation.
- structured conversationproduced by · A structured conversation is a deliberately guided discussion that uses questions or an organized sequence to clarify intent, requirements, or expected behavior.
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