Refine the Examples

Getting essential examples from your customer or product owner helps you getting started with the functionality. Unfortunately, a first discussion as we saw it in Part I might not give you all the examples that you need in order to build the software. You need to refine your examples after having identified a first set of it [Adz11].

Refinement of examples may happen in several ways. Usually, testers know how to flesh out hidden assumptions and boundary conditions from their first examples. Depending on the domain of the application, there may be constraints for a maximum length of a string, different validation rules, or combinations of business rules that exclude each other. If you miss these conditions in the initial Specification Workshop meeting, it pays to ask a tester to refine the examples.