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

Feeling overwhelmed by unreliable project delivery?

You’re not alone. Delivering projects that are both reliable and efficient can feel like navigating a maze. Missed deadlines, vague requirements, and misaligned teams can derail even the most ambitious projects.

At Satat, we faced these challenges firsthand during the development of CheckTrack, our app designed to streamline HRMS. By embracing Behavior-Driven Development (BDD), Scenarios, and T-Shirt Sizing, we’ve transformed how our teams deliver projects—and the results speak for themselves.

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.

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:

Behavior-Driven Development (BDD): Bridging the Gap

BDD ensures everyone involved speaks the same language. By focusing on natural-language descriptions, BDD makes it easier to align stakeholders and developers around the project goals.

Why BDD Works Wonders

1. Clear Communication: Shared understanding across the team.
2. Living Documentation: Gherkin scenarios double as test cases.
3. Automated Testing: Continuous validation reduces surprises.

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

Example from CheckTrack

Feature

Managing Employee Leave Requests

Scenario

Approving a leave request

1. Given the manager is logged into the system
2. When they approve a pending leave request
3. Then the request status changes to “Approved”
4. And the employee is notified via email

This approach helped our team cut down on misunderstandings and speed up development cycles for CheckTrack.

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:

Scenarios

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

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

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

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?

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

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.