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Comment by Morendil | Hacker News Reader

> I've come to believe that these problems are unsolvable.

"Unsolvable" is strong. My take is that these problems stem inevitably from approaching the goal ass-backwards.

You're trying to force a particular testing framework on people who don't care about frameworks, supposedly in the name of "better communication". There's no reason to expect that to work.

The way I've advocated doing it, for years now, is to first sit with the people in question, discover how they communicate about business goals that the programming effort is expected to assist, formalize their notation as little as you can get away with and use that for acceptance testing.

This should be a process of active listening, not passive recording. The client should be gently nudged away from speaking in solution-terms, for instance.

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> My take is that these problems stem inevitably from approaching the goal ass-backwards.

Yes, and that's the problem that's unsolvable. (Or very, very difficult.) I'm not saying people can't figure out how to use tools like Fit or Cucumber well; I'm saying that, for a lot of complicated human reasons, they don't. And I don't think there's anything a tool can do to change that.

The reason is that using Fit (or Cucumber) well requires that you change the way that you interact with your business-oriented colleagues. That's hard. It's not a technical problem; it's a social problem, and it needs face-to-face politicking. My experience is that teams that turn to tools first are even less likely to be able to solve these problems than those that don't. Many of them don't even understand that the problem exists.

In order for a tool to solve this problem, it would have to force—or strongly guide—the "proper" workflow and be highly desirable for everyone involved. Aslak & company are working on https://cucumber.pro/, which is a valiant attempt; it will be interesting to see if it works out.

I agree, unsolvable is not what I believe. I agree, what we have to learn is that is a frequent problem with organizational systems we create. I think by thinking about the problems we can create systems that work, but it requires some real focus - attempts that don't provide some real focus on the areas likely to create problems are likely to fail.

I think it is due to some systemic factors in most of our organizations so it often requires changes beyond some simple change. A huge key is what you mention the communication between "business owners" and the development team. You also need to stop the shouting down of people who say the new attempt won't work as being negative. Given the results around the globe there is lots of evidence it won't - we need to delve into why those who are criticizing the new hope think it won't work and try to adopt improvements to make it more likely to work.

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