Re: Difficulties writing stories

On Nov 22, 2004, at 10:53 AM, kent beck wrote:

>
> One of the questions I get asked often is what to do when you don't 
> know how to write stories the customer cares about. I would like to 
> hear from people who have written user-visible stories even when it 
> was difficult.

We experience this often with new teams are transitioning to XP. I've 
found that including a focus
on writing Story Tests (we call them this to keep them separate from 
predefined notions of what
"User Acceptance Testing" already means in their organization).

The discussion of the story begins to center around tests that make the 
feature visible
to the user.  I like to keep a simple rule of thumb - you can't 
estimate a story unless you
have a "confident" set of tests written on the back of the care.  Once 
you can estimate the
story, you need not discuss it further (during a planning session).

hope that helps,

----
John Goodsen                 RADSoft / Better Software Faster
jgoodsen-Ft5HhTtJyqRBDgjK7y7TUQ@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx            Extreme Programmer 
and Coach
http://www.radsoft.com          Enterprise Java and .NET Solutions



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