Frank Carver's Punch Barrel

Anyone who has worked with me in the past will probably recognize my standard response to vague or unclear requirements – “how will I know when I’m done?”. I use it so much becuase the simple trick of changing viewpoint to view work in terms of acceptance criteria is key to enabling sensible discussion, estimation, planning and development to begin.

Mark Needham has been considering similar issues, but rather than using the technique to clarify requirements so a pice of work can enter the development process, he looks at how to decide when to remove it.

Agile: When is a story done? at Mark Needham

As software testing spreads out in scope from the old notion of manual exercising of a system into areas such as developer unit tests and automated acceptance tests, the issue of ownership becomes more important. In this short and pithy post Kristan Vingrys states his opinion.

Vinktank | Who owns automated acceptance tests?

A fascinating counterpoint to Gojko Adzic‘s writings on acceptance testing in an agile process.

thekua.com@work » Automated story-based acceptance tests lead to unmaintainable systems

Update: here’s some more discussion on this topic, and how it is affected by the nature of user stories

User Stories are Just Schedulable Change