2 Structured Conversation

This chapter presents structured conversations as a practical way for software teams to uncover the behavior of a feature before building it. Using a pizza-delivery application as the example, the team gathers in a short requirement workshop to clarify a story about changing a delivery address after an order is placed. Rather than treating BDD as a rigid template exercise, they use collaboration, discussion, and concrete examples to expose hidden assumptions and refine what the story really means.

The main technique described is Example Mapping, where different colored cards are used to capture stories, rules, examples, and unanswered questions. As the team explores the address-change story, they build examples for the happy path, discover ambiguities in terms like “in preparation” versus “picked up,” and identify edge cases that require further thought. When they encounter questions they cannot answer, they record them explicitly so the discussion stays productive instead of getting stuck. In this way, the workshop becomes a deliberate discovery process that turns vague requirements into shared understanding.

The chapter concludes by explaining what makes a structured conversation effective: it must be collaborative, include diverse perspectives, stay short, focus progressively on what is being learned, and end with consensus. The goal is not to produce perfect documentation, but to agree on concrete behavior, surface important unknowns, and make the knowledge visible to the whole team. Example Mapping is presented as a simple, low-tech method that supports these goals and helps teams reach clear agreement quickly while preserving the detail needed for later development and testing.

Story card on the table

The first example card

State diagram of pizza ordering and delivery process to clarify the terminology that will be used in rules and examples

The corrected example card (changes underlined)

First rule in the example map

The second example card

A counter example and a question

The third example card

The final example map

• Requirements workshops are a collaborative meeting where the team develops a shared understanding of a user story. This often requires the team to develop unambiguous terminology for capturing their examples.
• The goal of a requirement workshop is deliberate discovery – the act of learning all about a user story before writing any code or tests.
• An effective way to conduct a requirements workshop is to use a technique called Example Mapping.
• Each rule in an example map is illustrated by one or more concrete examples of the rule in action.
• The term Rule is synonymous with Acceptance criterion and requirement.
• Example Mapping is one way to conduct a structured conversation.
• Structured conversations are collaborative, bringing diverse perspectives together. They should be short, fast-moving workshops – leading to consensus among the participants.

FAQ