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by bluGill 1198 days ago
It is great for removing ambiguity, but business executives don't want to think on that level any more than they have to.

It is terrible for simplifying things. Most people really know "I want ta safe self driving car", they don't want to figure out when it is acceptable to hit a kid on the road (think gory video games were people throw babies in front of your car for one case where it would be acceptable).

1 comments

Disambiguation is precisely what it's not great at, I think. I would often see stories like "Given a logged in user..." and the details of what kind of user it was would be buried in a step definition somewhere.

The restricted nature of the language encouraged this "dumbing down" of the high level requirements to the point where you couldn't really have intelligible conversations about gherkin scenarios without referring to step definitions, so the whole exercise becomes kinda pointless.

If your software scenarios had even slightly complex preconditions/steps then most people would just shove that complexity in a definition and paper over it.

Those should be I don't care about it now - it should work for anyone.

The idea is to get to what is different about this user. Security is important enough that you always want to specify a logged in user, but most details you don't care about and shouldn't ambiguous is good because it says I don't care.