Turing 036.5 - Killing User Stories With Gurkhas... I mean Gherkins
After finding out our teams, we covered standard work flow procedures using our waffle.io stories, git branch management within a team (through github), and communicating locally and remotely with your teammates.
For writing up user stories, convention has endorsed the used of a format called Gherkin (like the pickle -- because it arose from users of Cucumber, an acceptance testing library). It is important to note that it isn’t anything like the Gurkhas who might bravely cut your stories into bite sized chunks with their khukuri (though that might work as well!). What its called doesn’t matter. The format for users stories does. It is very specific. It follows this pattern:
As a (state the specifics of what kind of user you are testing, e.g ‘registered user,’ ‘authenticated user,’ ‘authenticated admin,’ etc.),
When I (state the action you want that user to take, e.g. fill in a form, click a button, visit a page, etc),
And I (state another RELATED action, repeat these ‘And’ statements as needed)
I expect (make assertions/expectations here) and...(more expectations as needed).
And that’s it. It’s that simple. Even as stories grow in complexity, the writing out of the process is the same. What is noticeable is that this conforms to how we want to shape our tests.
The setup, creating the Model Object,
Performing actions as that type,
Performing more actions as necessary
creating your acceptance expectations
Once we built our stories into Waffle, we talked about what we wanted to get out of the project. I tried to be clear that I would rather go slow and have each person understand each part of what we were doing than get a good grade (but that I would ALSO like to get a good grade :) Chris and MB seemed to be on-board with this as well. We talked about our availability and agreed to at least start off mob coding so each member knew what direction we wanted to take.