There are lots of names for the conversations we have to prepare user stories for development. Some people hold Three Amigos or Specification Workshops, some hold Planning Poker or Backlog Grooming sessions. Whatever you call this work, essentially you're trying to answer two questions:

• What do we want to make?
• How will we make it?

These two questions form a dynamic: when a clearly-defined requirement turns out to be complex to build, developers and product owners can usually negotiate to find a simpler what that has a more straightforward how. Similarly, product owners may not be able to clearly define what they want until they've had a chance to have it examined by the people who will think about how to build it.

I recently watched a team having what they called a Sprint Planning meeting. For this team, that meeting was their opportunity to have this conversation. As they laid out the stories for discussion--each on 5"x3" index cards--I came up with a suggestion.

Cucumber reached a million downloads in the first three years and 5 million downloads 3 years later. I'm happy to have created such a popular tool, but saddened to see how it's misused and misunderstood.

If you think Cucumber is a testing tool, please read on, because you are wrong.

Cucumber was born out of the frustration with ambiguous requirements and misunderstandings between the people who order the software and those who deliver it.