Beautiful Testing

Permanent Requirement Artifacts

Examples are permanent artifacts that elaborate Requirements; Stories are transient artifacts used to subdivide, prioritize, and plan the incremental development of the system. Our challenge is to end up with a coherent big picture of system requirements as we incrementally build it out of small, potentially disjointed stories, each of which may add new Examples and/or modify existing ones.

Figure 14-3 reflects the choice made to implement the success story of a particular feature in the first iteration. The story is shaded in gray to remind us of its transient nature. The righthand side of the diagram is the first increment of the permanent artifact containing the feature description (Requirement) seamlessly integrated with the corresponding Example.

Figure 14-3. Iteration 1 requirements artifacts

Figure 14-4 illustrates building up the permanent specifications incrementally (shown here in the style supported by Concordion^[71]). The initial success scenario is enhanced with a number of “what if” questions that link to further business rule descriptions and their corresponding Examples. Regardless of the size or ordering of the Stories used to plan the work during the project, the final requirements artifact needs to integrate Requirements and Examples in a coherent fashion. This is indeed a new standard of beauty for software requirements.

Figure 14-4. Iteration ...