A customer came to us with a project we should take over for maintenance. The project was built with knowledge by experts and we might expect it to be good. We believed in that and took over.

We normally use Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) in our projects in order to minimize misunderstandings between developers and our customers which can help reduce overhead and technical debt. This blog post describes our experiences with the tool Fitnesse and suggests Cucumber as an alternative to improve communication and efficiency. Why Behavior Driven Development BDD acts as a common language between business professionals and software developers to improve communication between the two.

Agile Coach Mike Cohn says that “almost every Story can be split with one of five techniques”. He uses the acronym SPIDR for them.

In iterative development, it’s always recommended to split work into small chunks. That way, it’s easier to understand and implement them. What should be done, however, when a User Story can’t be split, no matter how hard you try?

When working with Scrum, we make estimates on a regular basis. This could be in separate appointments, combined with a refinement, or with the entire team in the Sprint Planning. There’s nothing inherently good or bad about these options – the team decides what suits them best.