Your Privacy

This site uses cookies to enhance your browsing experience and deliver personalized content. By continuing to use this site, you consent to our use of cookies.
COOKIE POLICY

The Requirements Pickle | How Gherkin Can Get You Out of a Jam

The Requirements Pickle | How Gherkin Can Get You Out of a Jam
Back to insights

UDig’s Client Services team has partnered with our Engineering team to revamp the way we conduct client requirements gathering. This partnership has allowed for an increased universal understanding of a client’s wants and needs through intuitive user story development, consistent stakeholder engagement and workflow-centric design. While the benefits of such a practice are apparent for project management and development, our team discovered a few hidden benefits of this practice as it matured.

Requirements gathering is certainly not a new concept. Engaging with clients early and often from the inception of a project builds trust, prevents rework and provides direction for the team. In an Agile environment, development teams need requirements early to start design quickly. As a Project Manager, it is critically important to solicit accurate requirements in a format that makes sense to the client, designers, developers, engagement managers and beyond.

The cornerstone of this process has been the user story. User stories capture what a system user needs to do in a format that any stakeholder throughout the agile cycle can understand. UDig has long employed this methodology to translate functionality into business language but has recently employed a new all-inclusive strategy.

Enter the Gherkin format for user stories. The plain language parser, Gherkin, was created for the Cucumber software tool to conduct acceptance testing in a behavior-driven development (BDD) method. The core concept of BDD is that software development must be managed by interests both technical and business. This balancing act makes the Gherkin format perfect for structuring user stories. Gherkin is written using the following structure:

[Scenario]

GIVEN some context
WHEN some action is carried out
THEN a particular set of observable consequences should occur

Here is an example of how gherkin can be used to document the feature of adding a new item to an online shopping cart:

Scenario: User adds an item to a cart

GIVEN I am a logged in user
WHEN I go to the item page
AND I click “add item to cart”
THEN the quantity of items in my cart should go up
AND my subtotal should increment

Any scenario can benefit from this methodology as it provides a logical structure that developers can easily understand, project managers can easily track and clients can easily verify and tweak.

Digging In

  • Strategy & Planning

    Bridging the Gap Between an Idea and Its Impact

    Transforming a vision or idea into a tangible outcome that creates real value is a common challenge that many individuals and organizations face. Often, ideas remain abstract concepts without a clear path to realizing them and generating measurable impact. This gap between having an idea and understanding how to effectively execute and achieve the desired […]

  • Strategy & Planning

    Future-Proofing Profitability: A Forward-Thinking Technology Strategy

    The demands of operating in today’s marketplace continue to evolve at a rapid pace, perhaps just as rapidly as the introduction of new and emerging technologies. While the use of technology brings many benefits to consumers, businesses, and organizations alike, it also puts constant pressure on C-Suite executives to monitor industry trends, adapt the business […]

  • Strategy & Planning

    Developing a Technology Roadmap Aligned With Business Objectives

    Adversity has long been one of the most powerful catalysts for change. When faced with unprecedented challenges like global pandemics, economic recessions, or geopolitical conflicts, innovative organizations find a way to adapt, overcome, and thrive while others falter. In modern times, this change is facilitated by emergent tech, and one of the best ways to […]

  • Strategy & Planning

    Technology Business Case Template

    Quantify the ROI on Projects Before They Start Today’s technologists have no shortage of projects to tackle. What’s often missing is an objective method to evaluate and prioritize key initiatives and compare them with your organization’s unique profit strategy. Our free template gets you there faster. Most organizations have extensive technology wish lists, but a […]

  • Strategy & Planning

    Creating a Tech Strategy to Power Growth​

    Today, our client has an 18-month roadmap that outlines the technology, insights (data), talent, and process strategies for meeting their growth objectives. They have an action plan for every month to outline which steps they must take and which projects they lead or their partners lead. Further, they have the timeline for every implementation step and the associated tasks, benefits, and costs of the suggested strategy. Across the board, we’ve been able to position them with a robust tech strategy that offers real business value and can guide them toward their growth goals and beyond. 

  • Strategy & Planning

    Shaping Focus with Amplitude’s North Star Framework

    I recently watched Moneyball. It’s an 11-year-old movie about how the Oakland Athletics changed the way to structure winning baseball teams. In one scene, the A’s are fretting about how to pay good players with a shoestring budget. Jonah Hill’s character, Peter Brand, sums up the movie’s premise like this: “Your goal shouldn’t be to […]