Pols Consulting

The best part of XPDay is talking to people about what they do. I managed to catch Joe Walnes and Dan North’s talk on Awesome Acceptance Testing.

For as long as I can remember, Chris Matts and Dan North have been saying A user story’s behaviour is simply its acceptance criteria. If the system fulfils all the acceptance criteria, it’s behaving correctly; otherwise, it’s not.

What I had missed is their really nice acceptance criteria template.

Given some initial context,
When an event occurs,
then ensure some outcomes.

For example

Given Joe has a current account with a balance of £1 and an overdraft limit of £100,
When Joe withdraws £50.00,
then the balance will be £49.00.

This is so expressive and so wonderfully simple that anyone in the business can write them. Thanks to Joe for showing me this.

I recently had the opportunity to help Rachel Davies run a class on User Stories (I was more the unglamorous assistant). The class produced some wonderful examples that we wanted to share. Rachel has blogged them. These are some of my favourites.

As a boy I want a big garden that can house a kennel so that my mum can buy me a dog.

As a teenage daughter, I would like my own bathroom so I don’t have to share with my younger brother (Kevin).

As Grandma, I want big windows to watch what is happening in the neighbourhood so that I can gossip.

As a dog, I want to live close to the park so I can go for walks and sticks to play with would be nice.

Fantastic.