Re: Difficulties writing stories

William Pietri wrote:

> So our solution was to push it back into the customer's lap. We
> eventually got the CEO to describe the maximum load he wanted to be able
> to handle at 6 months after launch. This became known as "Load Level A",
> and we wrote cards like
> 
>       * 1/10% of Load Level A
>       * 1% of Load Level A
>       * 10% of Load Level A
>       * 100% of Load Level A
> 
> we were also worried about reliability, and so we wrote cards like
> 
>       * System remembers changes after restart
>       * Max 6-hour downtime after single-box failure
>       * Max 1-hour downtime after single-box failure
>       * Max 5-minute downtime after single-box failure
>       * User doesn't notice single-box failure

I really like this technique: writing reliability stories in terms of 
mean time between failure over a period of time. Many projects pretend 
that high reliability/availability is essentially free, so many 
customers simply say "I want five 9s uptime!" Even if we don't achieve 
the goals, it's a big step forward to ask the customer to think about 
how much insurance she wants to pay for. Maybe only 90% uptime is good 
enough for the first three years. Maybe we can get 90% uptime free, but 
99% costs $5M. Ms Customer, are you really going to lose $5M in revenue 
if you're only up 90% of the time? We'll build it if you want, but we'd 
hate to see you waste $5M, even if we end up with a bunch of it. It's 
important to consider the question and demand these things thoughtfully, 
rather than as a matter of course.
-- 
J. B. (Joe) Rainsberger
Diaspar Software Services
http://www.diasparsoftware.com
Author, JUnit Recipes: Practical Methods for Programmer Testing


------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> 
$4.98 domain names from Yahoo!. Register anything.
http://us.click.yahoo.com/Q7_YsB/neXJAA/yQLSAA/nhFolB/TM
--------------------------------------------------------------------~->