One Possible Relationship between Product Backlog Items and Scenarios

One Possible Relationship between Product Backlog Items and Scenarios


The website https://scrumbook.org has great information on the various aspects of Scrum.??It gives details on Product Backlogs, Product Backlog Items (PBIs), and other terms.?(The quoted words in this article are from the website). ??ATDD/BDD uses scenarios to define the behavior of an application. This article describes one possible relationship between PBIs and scenarios.??

In Scrum, there is the Development Team – “people who can make and deliver the product” and a Product Owner who guides product direction.?In ATDD/BDD, the development team has two perspectives - developers who implement the requirements and testers who critically analyze the requirements and the implementation.?The product owner, developers, and testers form the Triad.?

In Scrum, the product owner creates PBIs which are “deliverables awaiting development rather than the requirements that these deliverables satisfy”.?They represent the solution space.?

A PBI for a sales website might be:

???????????????Discount Coupons

with a hypothesis such as:

?????? We think that having discount coupons will encourage more buying as measured by an increase in sales of 10%.??

The PBIs may be decomposed into smaller PBIs in refining the backlog ???In ATDD/BDD, the triad can collaborate to determine high-level behaviors that give a way to split a PBI.?For example, Discount Coupons might have two behaviors described by these scenarios:

???????????????Scenario:?Amount Off Coupon

???????????????Given the customer is paying for an order

???????????????When a coupon is submitted

???????????????Then the order total is reduced by the coupon amount


???????????????Scenario:?Percentage Off Coupon

???????????????Given the customer is paying for an order

???????????????When a coupon is submitted

???????????????Then the order total is reduced by the coupon percentage?

Each scenario can deliver value independently, so they could become two PBIs. ??

The PBI is broken down into Sprint Backlog Items (SBIs).?SBIs are “work items as tasks, but the team can instead represent them as internal artifacts or as the result of any other breakdown”. With ATDD/BDD, the SBIs might represent detailed scenarios, such as:

Scenario:?Amount Off Coupon

???????????????Given the customer is paying for an order

???????????????| Order Total |??Date |

???????????????| 50.00???????????| Feb 14 |

???????????????And coupon is available

???????????????| Coupon???|?Valid Between |?Amount | Minimum Order Total |

???????????????| VAL05?????| Feb 14 – Feb 14 | 5.00???? ???|?25.00????????????????????????????|

???????????????When the coupon is submitted

???????????????Then the order total is reduced by the coupon amount

???????????????| Order Total |

???????????????| 45.00??????????|

A specific scenario such as this describes one behavior.?Other scenarios could be for exceptions or alternative conditions such as:

  • ??Handling a coupon that is out of date
  • ?Applying two coupons to a single order ??
  • Disallowing a coupon from being used more than once

?An SBI consist of one or more scenarios.??The details in the scenarios can be added anytime from backlog refinement through sprint planning, depending how your process operates.??Additional scenarios may be discovered during the sprint and a decision made as to whether they are part of the current SBI or whether a new SBI should be created.??

Scenarios as the above also represent tests.??A scenario acting as a test simply checks that the Then step represents the actual result of the implementation.??These tests can become part of the Definition of Done.?The tests change when the required behavior changes, but are usually written so they are independent of how the behavior is implemented.?

The scenarios become documentation of how an application works.????Unlike conventional documentation, they can be executed as a check that the application still behaves in the way the scenario describes.?? The scenarios can be demonstrated during the sprint review.

You get a “four-for” using BDD/ATDD scenarios:

  • A way to break PBI’s into SBIs
  • Tests for those SBIs
  • Demo for sprint review
  • Executable documentation?

Try experimenting with BDD/ATDD and see how it compares to what you are doing now.

John Clifford

Let me help your organization get more done with the same effort, with improved morale, to a higher level of quality, through discovery and correction of non-obvious and subtle gaps in your approach to work.

2 年

I'm not a fan of ONLY having individual tasks ('SBIs') visible within the sprint. I am a fan of dynamically decomposing PBIs into individual tasks AFTER the sprint goal has been established and during the sprint itself, as a collaborative effort... and showing the tasks as the lowest level of the work hierarchy. Teams own PBIs, Developers own tasks (through self-assignment). Scenarios are a form of acceptance criteria... criteria of functional completeness.

Israel Santiago

Delivery Manager, Engenheiro de Software, Tech Manager, Gerente de Projetos

2 年

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