Let me digress to make a comparison (in the process I may age myself but so be it) - I think back to the time when desktop publishing was first introduced. With desktop publishing draft copies gained a way of looking complete, finalized and picked up an air of authority based solely on the crisp appearance of the material.

I think of user stories in the same way.

I don’t like to review user stories and believe that they are always “right.” I don’t believe that the stories are always “complete.” And I don’t believe user stories can be the authoritative source for anything more than “what the author thought the application would do at the time they wrote the story.” I am a committed skeptic.

Not long ago, someone emailed me asking me to write about working with user stories. I have a few thoughts about working with user stories. I thought I would write about what I call the “missing parts problem” this time.

In my experiences working with user stories, one element often missing is how a new feature will work with existing features. Notice that I stated “in my experience” because this doesn’t need to be the case. I realize this statement might bring questions to mind – it raised questions in my mind as I tried to explain the missing part problem to a project stakeholder recently. These are the questions and thoughts that roll through my mind and are darn close to a conversation I had recently.

I recently finished reading the novel, Complications, A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science. It was one of those books that I sometimes had a hard time staying physically seated to read because I had such strong reactions to what the author had to say. My spiked reactions were centered on how frequently the author described what I have felt in my own career, albeit we are in slightly different professions. The book is divided into three parts: Fallibility, Mystery, and Uncertainty. Perhaps you can already see the correlations I was making.

I finally had a chance to visit a store in Chicago, called Marbles, The Brain Store. They sell games designed to strengthen the brain. Their website and newsletters include other info centered around the brain - and not everything is about buying stuff.

I went around the store looking for games that would be interesting to me. Not surprising, I gravitated towards word games. I picked up Bananagrams. Its a game that travels well and can easily be played in small windows of time. Perfect.

There is a world of storytellers and in that world there is a community just as much as there is a community in software testing. Katharine Hansen reached out to me recently with a warm welcome to the community of storytellers. She has website filled with information. I’ve added her site to my Google Reader, its packed with information. One story Kathy’s especially interested in is meeting and talking to people who are not storytellers professionally but use story in their work. She’s sought people from many different professions and has built a collection of stories on her site. She interviewed me recently, you can read it here.

An SCD is a slowly changing dimension in a data warehouse. There are three different forms of SCDs. SCD1 overwrites data, SCD2 maintains historical data and SCD3 maintains some of the data.

SCDs and testing in a data warehouse is likely a topic that you’re either entirely interested in or it’s a tech area off your radar. Over the past few months I’ve been doing some work in a data warehouse again and have at times looked through blogs and forums for information and experiences, and in most cases found little information written from a testing perspective. I’m going to try to share some of my experiences being of course, mindful of client confidentially and steering very wide from any specific data – I’ll make up data if I need to. Testing SCD2s is one topic I’ve looked to hear experiences from other testers but have found little to no shared experiences.

A thought I wanted to share. Perhaps not directly related to testing but I think could be helpful in other ways. I’ll pose this as a question:

Do you give yourself a gold star? Or are you dependent on someone else giving it to you?

Some years ago I had finished up some project work and was lamenting to my coworker Chris that my boss – who we had in common – hadn’t noticed my extra work. I was looking for some recognition from my boss. I couldn’t put my finger on what it was I was seeking. But my coworker Chris could. He said to me why do you need the external validation?

Saturday morning I picked up a rental car. The process wasn’t unusual since I’ve picked up a car several times over the last few months from the same rental location. At this point, I know most of the car rental staff by name and even by their voices on the phone when I call in a reservation.

Notably as I’m getting to know the staff members, I’ve noticed most of them try to get me in the nicest car on the lot at the best price. But one of the car rental staff seems to do the opposite. It seems the more frequently I rent a car, one of the staff members, (I’ll call him Ed) is less interested in making sure I’m satisfied. Ed, it seems, sees me as a repeat customer, a customer he can shuttle out quickly. The more Ed works with me, the less interested he seems to be in making me happy. Perhaps he assumes I will return regardless of the service.

Later in the day, I was sitting down for a quite lunch alone, reflecting on the rental car situation, I was thinking about the frequent and repeat customer. How do I treat my repeat customers?