Building Reliable Project Delivery with BDD, Scenarios, and T-Shirt Sizing – The CheckTrack

The Challenges We’ve All Encountered

Projects often begin with excitement but lose momentum when the following issues arise:

• Vague Requirements: Misaligned expectations across teams.
• Unrealistic Planning: Some tasks are underestimated, others overestimated.
• Lack of Team Alignment: Communication gaps cause delays and rework.

Sound familiar? These obstacles can drain resources and delay progress. To overcome them, we adopted a systematic approach for CheckTrack—and saw remarkable changes.

How Do We Deliver Consistently Reliable Projects?

To solve these challenges, we combined three proven practices:

• Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) to ensure clarity.
• Scenarios to align teams and users around real-world needs.
• T-Shirt Sizing to simplify task estimation.

This framework became the backbone of how we developed and enhanced CheckTrack. Here’s how it works:

Scenarios: Bringing Projects to Life

Scenarios make BDD actionable by showcasing real-world behaviors and outcomes. They help keep development focused on delivering value to the user.

Why Scenarios Are Crucial:

• User-Centric Focus: Teams design features with the end-user in mind.
• Awareness of Edge Cases: Potential issues are addressed early.
• Simplified Testing: Scenarios are easy to automate, ensuring robust quality assurance.

Examples from CheckTrack:

• Scenario 1: Employees submit a leave request.
• Scenario 2: Managers approve or reject requests.
• Scenario 3: Notifications are sent to employees.

Breaking the project into these relatable pieces allowed us to deliver CheckTrack in smaller, predictable increments.

T-Shirt Sizing: Simplifying Complexity

Accurate task estimation can be daunting, but T-Shirt Sizing simplifies it by categorizing tasks into sizes (XS, S, M, L, XL).

How It Works:

• Divide and Conquer: Break features into smaller tasks.
• Assign Sizes: Estimate complexity relative to similar tasks.
• Plan with Confidence: Prioritize work effectively.

Examples from CheckTrack:

• XS: Fixing a typo in the UI.
• S: Adding a button for leave requests.
• M: Developing the leave management module.
• L: Integrating payroll functionality.
• XL: Building an analytics dashboard.

By eliminating overthinking, T-Shirt Sizing kept the CheckTrack team aligned and focused.

Project Tiles: How It All Comes Together

When BDD, Scenarios, and T-Shirt Sizing are combined, you get Project Tiles—a modular, structured way to organize and execute deliverables.

What Makes a Project Tile?

• BDD Features: Define the desired behaviors.
• Scenarios: Outline real-world workflows.
• T-Shirt Sizes: Estimate the effort required.

Example Project Tile for CheckTrack:

• Feature: Employee leave management
• Scenarios: Submission, approval, notifications
• Sizes: M for leave module, S for notifications

This modular approach allowed us to track progress, resolve bottlenecks, and deliver CheckTrack on time.

The Results Speak for Themselves

By adopting BDD, Scenarios, and T-Shirt Sizing during the development of CheckTrack, our team achieved:

• Faster delivery cycles.
• Reduced miscommunication and rework.
• Improved alignment between technical teams and business goals.

At Satat, this approach has changed the game for how we deliver reliable, efficient projects.