Writing Great Specifications: Using Specification By Example and Gherkin

by Kamil Nicieja

Specification by Example and Gherkin offer programmers, designers, and managers an inclusive environment for clear communication, discovering requirements, and building a documentation system.

Writing Great Specifications is an example-rich tutorial that teaches readers how to write good Gherkin specification documents that take advantage of Specification by Example's benefits. Engineers and testers will find it helpful in striking a stronger chord with non-technical audiences through automated specifications.

Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications.

277 pages, Paperback

Published November 7, 2017

Reviews

[Johnny · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book contains many good ideas on how to organize your specifications. Each one has pros and cons and Kamil Nicieja explains them well enough so that you can make an informed decision on which one you use.

For me the most important point of the book: Use the free text in scenarios and features to explain the reasoning behind your examples. You can write as much as you need to give (new) developers a chance to fully understand a requirement.

I didn’t like the long introductions at the beginning of a chapter on what I’m going to read and the even longer summarisation at the end of what I now have read. I would appreciate more content and less talk about it.
The book would be much simpler to understand by beginners if the appendix would be the first chapter. Those who read this book for the intermediate content will be able to skip it and all others get at least a refresher on how to write examples.

[Michael Greifeneder · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first chapters are really great when you start. The later chapters will get useful after a while. So while I enjoyed the first half, I hope that I can return to the second half with more motivation.

[Christoph Kappel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a really good starter for the general topic of specification by example. It contains lots of practical ideas and examples and also combines nicely with the overall approach of domain-driven design.

During this book I discovered lots of things I didn't know about cucumber and gherkin and I have to look into.

[Christophe Addinquy · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is the follow-up of Gojko's Azic's Specification by Example. However, it's more centered on Gherkin by trying to give it more reading vertues. In a second step, it focuses on tests structuration, using arrays and providing guidelines about it. In the end, the author proposes to structure the feature files themslves. We may disagree with some ideas (I do), but they will help to mature your owns.
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