----- Original Message -----
From: "Gary Feldman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Thursday, December 30, 2004 9:28 PM
Subject: Re: [XP] User Stories and 'the Big Picture'
>
> Ron Jeffries wrote:
>> On Wednesday, December 29, 2004, at 10:11:07 PM, Gary Feldman wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Here's a question that's been bothering me: How do you know that
>>>the information captured in the Executable Acceptance Test is a
>>>reliable and complete representation of the story?
>>
>>
>> Good question, but here's an equally serious one: how, using any
>> method, do you /ever/ know that?
>
> The traditional answer to that is with system testing, which, at least for
> stories involving human interaction, has testers actually performing their
> side of the story (or, if the project is lucky, writing scripts that do
> so).
>
> The distinctions that come to mind quickly are a) the more the abstraction
> or transformation between the story and the test, the more difficult it is
> to confirm they match; and b) system testers whose job descriptions
> include spending a substantial chunk of time understanding the customer
> perspective. Modern methodologies certainly help with the second point by
> demanding more direct contact between the development team and the
> customers.
>
> It's the first that concerns me, particularly with FIT and FitNesse. The
> table-driven testing language seems to give higher weight to easily
> writing test cases and easily implementing automation, and lower weight to
> making it easy to see the relationships between the test cases and the
> stories (or other antecedents).
Part of that is that the test cases are directly derived from the stories.
There
is a one to many relationship between stories and FIT tests. When you're
done implementing a story, there should be a sheaf of FIT tests that
describes
that story, and no other.
Granted, that relationship isn't all that easy to see in the beginning
because
it isn't spelled out in the literature. However, it's there even though
there is
no formal mechanism to make the relationships explicit.
The reason for the lack of a formal mechanism is that many (possibly even
most) projects simply don't need it, and XP doesn't define mechanisms that
are only sometimes needed. That's what RUP does, and experiance shows
that lots of people think that if it's in the book, you have to do it. So we
don't put it in the book.
Now, if I had a project that did require it, I'd implement a link that could
be traced by a simple Perl, Python, Ruby or whatever script. But I wouldn't
do that until I had an organizational or regulatory requirement to do it.
John Roth
>
> Gary
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