specification by example

Specification by example (SBE) is a user-driven contextual approach to defining software requirements.

SBE requires business stakeholders to provide realistic scenarios for how the software will be used and those examples are used to determine the scope of the project. This approach has two major benefits -- it encourages communication between the business owners of a project and the software development team and it helps the developers align software specifications with user acceptance testing (UAT). When done right, the specifications can be validated through automated software tests that run frequently.

In order for SBE to succeed, it's important that the business owners provide the development team with precise examples that illustrate how slices of the system should behave. It's equally important for the development team to make sure each specification by example is testable.

Read the whole SBE article