Tell your stories with great customer examples.

I was a business analyst on an agile development team spread over multiple locations. We used Jira to create user stories and manage our product backlog. During a backlog refinement event, I asked the team members to state the parts of the story that were most useful to them during implementation:

• The user story definition? 
• The context description?
• The acceptance criteria?
• The customer examples?

The respondents disagreed, but we spent the remaining time discussing the Jira story’s customer examples.

Specification by Example

Agile analysts can use Specification by Example or Behavior Driven Development (BDD) techniques to capture customer needs using concrete examples in a natural language format.

BDD uses the Gherkin syntax for test automation to capture the Given, When, and Then clauses. These three clauses represent the preconditions, the triggering event, and the expected results of a business scenario.

Consider this example of Gherkin for a Windows 10 user:

Scenario: Start Windows 10 laptop

• Given that the laptop is turned off 
• and the computer is plugged in or the battery is sufficiently charged 
• When I press the ON button
• Then the laptop powers up 
• and I get the Windows Sign-in prompt.

But the Gherkin syntax is not the only way to capture specifications by example. For example, I use Excel worksheets to organize complex business scenarios’ preconditions, events, and expected results.

Stories and Specification by Example

I held my first Specification by Example workshop in 2018.

In retrospect, I had collected customer examples many times before because I often tried to gather samples from the customers to understand their needs better.

The differences between my customer examples before and after 2018 are as follows:

• The 2018 examples were not “supporting documentation” I could hide in an appendix.
• The 2018 examples were not requirement artifacts that I would later discard.
• The 2018 examples were the desired outcome of the workshop. 
• The 2018 examples were the holy grail from which I would create user stories, context descriptions, and acceptance criteria.

By leveraging the use of customer examples, I applied two of seven principles for agile business analysis from the International Institute of Business Analysis™ (IIBA®): “Get Real Using Examples” and “Avoid Waste.”

Great Customer Examples

Whether they are for commodity derivative valuations or money market transaction reporting, great customer examples have three (3) properties.

Great customer examples are real, relevant, and relatable:

1. Real examples uncover real-life scenarios in the business
2. Relevant examples provide the scope and context of the problem
3. Relatable examples connect the stakeholder with the solution to the problem

Great customer examples deliver concrete, testable models of customer needs on which we can elaborate to build the right solution. We must collaborate closely with the customer to develop good customer examples.

Tell your story with real, relevant, and relatable customer examples.