Others have talked about the virtues of stories as vertical slices of a problem (end-to-end capabilities) rather than horizontal slices (system layers or components). So, if we slice the problem with user stories, how do we slice the user-stories themselves?

If, as I sometimes say, acceptance tests (a.k.a. examples/scenarios/acceptance-criteria) are the knife with which we slice a story into even thinner vertical slices, then I would say my observation of 'tasks' is that they are used as the knife used to cut a story into horizontal slices. This feels wrong...

I never really realized the parallels between software development and golf course layout. Both have a technical component, and a reliance on usability. The Australian (Golf) Open moves from city to city each year, and has a hiccup every so often. This year they had a five hour outage.

How do you get an outage in golf? While not in the infamous class , this years competition was held at a cliff top course in Sydney overlooking the ocean. Spectacular but windy. A savage wind blowing balls the width of the green had players blowing par just with their putters. A 5.5 hour delay to play was called by which time the wind speed had halved. The outage confused the local players who said those conditions were typical and just “par for the course”. The greens were all very fast, 10.5 based on their stimpometer score, much higher than the 8 recommended by some players before the tournament started. While the golf club staff ignored the advice, they had tried to slow 4 of the faster holes. The rest of the tournament was played sucessfully in windy conditions that kept the flags taut but didn’t move the balls.

Lewis Hamilton became the youngest Formula One racing car champion last year, in spectacular circumstances with a last gasp fifth place in the last race. This year, as tabloid headlines screamed “hero to zero”, his success has been measured by trying to avoid being lapped by the leaders and ending a five race drought without winning a point.

While Wolfram Alpha seems to have been endowed with both a sense of humor and self, there are some curious logic bugs. Try this, enter Name kim stacy terry jan frankie. WA shows the popularity of each name in the US census. It also asks whether you meant the male or female version of each name. This is very intelligent! It also says it assumes it is a list, and offers to do a multiplication instead???!!!! Clicking the multiplication link returns the standard “dont understand” message.

My favorite (so far) relates to two movies based on books. Enter Name tom jones . WA knows this is not just any two names. It assumes “tom jones” is a book (with a movie link option as well) then says it is a title, then the result is Data not available . Mmmm, let’s understand this a little better from the WA point of view, I assume it is a book, Yep, It’s a book title that I know, Nah, forget all that, too hard, no idea at all! It does find it as a movie though.

If we try another entry name color purple we get the same problem: no book data but normal movie data. We can guess what is causing it: there is a record of a movie of the book but no details on the book itself yet. Hopefully the book data will be “made available” soon….. However, if you just type in Color purple , you get information on the color purple, with a link to the book or the movie. Clicking on the book link then show full details of the book. Huh?

OK, let’s just try Tom Jones . Now we find out he is a singer, but we also have a link to a book or a film. Clicking on the book link tells us now that there is some limited data: the author is Henry Fielding. As Alice in Wonderland said, “Curiouser and Curiouser”, I try Alice in Wonderland , and there are 5 movies, but no book!

Finally, I tell WA “Im not sure what to do with your output” to which it replies “WA is not sure what to do with your input”!

I've been pairing with Andy Palmer over this last week. I have to say it's been a lot of fun... and I think we've learned a lot from the experience. One of the things I learned from Andy this week was an innovative use of Hungarian notation for interfaces... Andy told me about Udi Dahan's presentation on intentions and interfaces (PDF)

In Finland, there is a religious annual that comes out (obviously) every year, collecting 12 monthly magazines into a bound volume. The 116th edition of Vartija was printed in 2004 with the theme, “Doctrines Challenged by the Faith of Common Man”. I guess most Finnish libraries stock it, and Finns are regular readers borrowing 3 books every 2 months. If we have faith in common man, we can presume that they also return them. Unless their great grandchildren return them a little overdue….

When doing Acceptance Test Driven Development, one of the things that people find hard to understand at first is the nature of an acceptance test.

In the process of teaching it over the last few days, combined with my own experience and some of the discussions during the Agile Alliance Test Tools workshop I've found another way of helping people to understand how to write 'good' acceptance tests.