Example Mapping is a workshop format associated with Behavior-Driven Development in which a team works through a user story by laying out its business rules together with the examples, counter-examples and edge cases that illustrate them, and the questions that remain open. Each of these becomes a piece of structured information that progressively reduces ambiguity about the expected behaviour.
Usage
Organiser une équipe de développement à l’ère de l’IA - Part II.2 argues that the workshop takes on new importance with AI agents: it no longer serves only to align the team, but turns conversations into behavioural knowledge that agents can use. In that post’s chain, the output of Example Mapping is formalised as Gherkin scenarios, which then feed a living specification in Spec-driven development. The same post suggests that the open questions an Example Mapping session raises can be put in real time to an agent that holds the project’s context, which can recall existing rules, detect inconsistencies, highlight impacts or suggest lines of investigation — while the decisions remain the participants’.
When It Applies
- Conditions. It applies when a user story’s behaviour has to be clarified collectively before implementation, with business experts and the team in the room.
- Assumptions. It assumes the rules and examples it produces are then carried into a durable form — in the post’s account, Gherkin scenarios and a specification — rather than left in the conversation.
- Failure modes. The post stresses that agents reason only from what is explicit, so rules, exceptions or edge cases left out of the workshop’s output become potential sources of error in what the agents produce.
- Establishment. The post links to Cucumber’s documentation for the practice; its claim that the workshop gains importance in agent-driven development is the post author’s argued position.