The Tragedy of Given-When-Then

There was no standard format but everyone was influenced by Alistair Cockburn’s “Writing Effective Use Cases”:

The traditional world of analysis was where these abstract descriptions of the system’s data, calculation and behaviour were used to drive the development of a system. The focus of the Given-When-Then format allowed the business analyst to create a “Happy Path” scenario and then hold a “Three Amigoes” session to explore “Quality Paths” (Given the volatility market data is missing) and “Technical Paths” (Given the server is unavailable). We will realise that describing data and calculations using the Given-When-Then format leads to tragedy, and will create and popularise tools and approaches using Excel to document examples.

Source: theitriskmanager.com