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This is the second in a series of posts about how to program, and before I begin I should say that this series is probably more about how to be a Software Developer but I used the tag line ‘How To Program’ to catch the interest of the intended audience, School or University Students.

This post is about what is arguably the most important part of being a Software Developer, Requirements. A good Developer helps solve the problems that the Customer is trying to solve and gives you an experience-based opinion of all the risks along the way so the Customer can make informed choices, and none of this is possible if you don’t know what the Customer wants. After you know what the Customer wants you can then go through a process of getting as close to that as possible. When I say Customer, I mean anyone who interacts with you, as how well you interact with a Customer will shape your work life.

Whole careers are built around obtaining and understanding Customer requirements and I don’t profess to be the best person to provide information on how to get requirements, but I can tell you the techniques I have used with success.

Keep in mind that almost always a Customer will say what they want in terms of a solution they have in mind. For example, the School Teacher Customer may say “I want a web application that allows me to take attendance/roll-call.”, but do they really need a web application? Do they really need to take attendance/roll-call? How would you know, how would they know? Your task is to get to the bottom or most basic needs and problems of the Customer. Maybe they have the right solution in mind, but you won’t know if you don’t know the problems they are trying to solve. Maybe a barcode on each students forehead that is automatically scanned when they walk through the school gates is the solution? To make things more complicated the initial Customer may not be the only Customer and the solution may need to take others into account as well.

Ask “Why?” until you get to what is the root problem or need that is to be addressed. This is usually about five (5) Whys or when the Customer can’t reduce the need any further. Asking “why” needs to be done with tact and sympathy or asking why repeatedly could cause friction and then getting to the real need may become impossible.

Ask “How will having the requirement benefit them?” to find out what is required from another angle, the angle of satisfaction. This will help you understand the scope of the requirement and possibly the quality required in the solution. Sometimes finding out the benefit the Customer perceives they will get from a requirement can also bring out the real requirement or need. For example, a Customer who wants a faster Web Site might actually want a faster graphics card or faster Internet connection. The other advantage of asking how the Customer will be benefit from the requirement is that it can also bring out that the Customer isn’t the actual Customer for the requirement, in which case you need to find the other Customer. For example, we had the School Teacher who wanted a Web Application to take attendance/roll-call but it probably didn’t benefit them directly but is required as part of the process the School follows. So maybe the School Teacher isn’t the Customer, but the School Administrators?

I’m probably going to be a little controversial with this next statement, but it is something I feel strongly about and have had success by maintaining. If you can’t find a Customer who needs the requirement then it shouldn’t be a requirement. Every requirement should have a Customer who needs it and can define the satisfaction criteria for the requirement. You may have to look hard to find them but you know you have found them when you can say that requirement X benefits Customer Y directly because of Z.

In summary:

Ask why to uncover the real need or problem.

Identify the benefit(s) of meeting the requirement.

I recommend reading Jonathan Babcocks Blog http://practicalanalyst.com/ and Liz Keogh’s Blog http://lizkeogh.com/ for informative insights into Requirements.

The next instalment is Analysis.

Recently I worked on a Ruby On Rails Project using rake, rspec, cucumber and celerity and I really enjoyed this suite of tools. More recently I started a side-side Project that is Java based but I wanted a similar set of tools, especially Cucumber as this allows the other people involved to write scenarios that are then progressively implemented by others. Cucumber support for Java (and other languages) is available through the Cuke4Duke Project.

The out of the box examples from the Cuke4Duke project get you started but I wanted more, I wanted a Project that:

• Was automated, with unit-test, integration-tests and Web Based interaction tests.
• Was able to run against different Web Browsers through simple configuration.
• Was able to run without using a browser when this type of interaction took too long.
• Was able to be added simply and quickly to a Continuous Integration Server.
• Was a small initial download and didn’t require a lot of configuration or knowledge to get running.

I took the out of the box examples for spring and web driver from cuke4duke and combined them together with some Maven magic and produced a simple Hello World Web Application with almost all of the attributes I wanted.  I also added some placeholder classes, unit tests, integration tests and a cucumber scenario.  The Page Object pattern and the excellent PageFactory tools are also used to provide an example of driving the Web Application through Scenario Steps.

The goal of the Skeleton is to jump start my own and possibly your own projects using BDD and TDD and lots of automation to get you from A-to-B quicker and with more confidence in the result.

You can get the skeleton project from gitHub or download it here: maven-cuke4duke-jump-start
Or just do these commands:

git clone http://github.com/jamesladd/maven-cuke4duke-jump-start.git

cd maven-cuke4duke-jump-start

mvn -Dcucumber.installGems=true cuke4duke:cucumber

mvn clean integration-test

To start the project building and see it in action check the README file.

*NOTE* When building the maven project for the first time there is a *LOT* of cuke4duke dependencies downloaded, but just the first time. It takes a while, but only the first time.

And now the weird part, if on the first run the Cucumber steps fail, run mvn clean integration-test again. This also only has to be done once and from then on all work without error.

UPDATE: I have added maven profiles to the project so you can now choose which Web Browser to use to drive the web site, for example, -P chrome will use the Chrome browser. This is documented in the README.  With this feature you can configure your Continuous Integration server to run the build for each browser you support.

UPDATE: Added database setup and migration support using Liquibase and HSQL.

UPDATE: Added support for Cuke4Duke V0.3.0