How we improved quality and reduced cycle time by using effective conversations

1. ATDD and Conversations in
Paddy Power
Augusto “Gus” Evangelisti
Full time Foosball Player
Part time tester

2. The Start - The Good Stuff
Very good engineering
practices
• Unit tests
• Continuous Integration
• Code Reviews
• Some Pair Programming
• TDD
• ATDD
Agile practices
• One team
experimenting with
Kanban
• Other teams doing
Scrum

3. The Issues
• Teams not fully cross-functional
• Contract negotiation and sign-offs
• Ownership
• Quite a few bugs in UAT
• Focus on Quality Control

4. Why was ATDD not working?
I asked people: What’s ATDD for you?
1) Expressing the tests in Given When Then
format and using a tool to automate them
2) Helps building an automated regression suite
3) Testing technique
4) Live documentation
5) You use Jbehave and write automated tests

5. ATDD according to Gus
Acceptance Test Driven Development is
about people, communication, collaboration
and delivering business value
Amen

6. The People

7. How We Implemented ATDD in PP
Based on ATDD cycle model developed by Elisabeth Hendrickson. The Specification by Example concept is taken from Gojko Adzic

8. The Conversations

9. Example of Conversation
In order to encourage bulk buy
As a marketing manager
I want to give free delivery for orders of 5 or
more books

10. The lean Conversation
In order to IDENTIFY SELECTIONS in the CORRECT SCORE market
As a Destination X
I want to receive a Correct_Score_Home and
Correct_Score_Away field at Selection Level
Why?
Why do we send it?
But customer A does not use system X and doesn’t sell
product Y
Let’s ask why BigBoss wants to send it!

11. The Ambiguous Conversation
In order to collect my fares quickly
As a Taxi driver
I want to see my closest customer as a red dot

12. What we learned
Always seek the real value, ask “why?”
If you don’t understand,
be brave, ask “what?”
Ask “what’s the worst that can happen?” and find edge cases
Ask the “shifty man” question, try to game the system