Discovery - Gaspar Nagy and Seb Rose
An Honest Review
This book helps us understand that BDD is not a tool. Often teams use gherkin as a tool to automate their tests and think that they follow BDD, this book clarifies the confusion very well.
BDD has 3 practices: Discovery, Formulation and Automation.
This book focuses on the Discovery aspects. It highlights the importance of discovery and how teams could have structured conversations to understand the requirement better such that the failures caused by misunderstanding can be eliminated. The book guides you through understanding how creating examples can effectively flush out ambiguity.
We will understand thoroughly a technique called Example Mapping (discovered/invented by Matt Wynne) which helps teams with having productive yet short and structured conversations thereby helping them to discover the requirement better.
We will also learn more about the artifacts that would be captured as part of the example mapping session. Namely, the Story, Rules, Examples and Questions, and how each artifact has an impact in understanding the requirement effectively. The book further explains about how examples comprises of a context, action and outcome.
Example mapping is a really powerful technique and can be used for having a common understanding of the business requirement in cross functional teams. It can also be used for understanding any type of problem that the teams need to solve collaboratively.
Overall it is a high impact, quick to read book. It is very well written and I promise that readers would appreciate the need for good discovery sessions in their development teams after reading this book - if not already.
Looking forward for their next book: Formulation!
