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~ using my evil powers for good

Category Archives: Acceptance Criteria

Story Time!

16 Monday Sep 2013

Posted by claire in Acceptance Criteria, Agile2013, Approaches, Context, Experiences, Experiments, Metrics, Personas, Publications, Retrospective, Speaking, Training

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Agile2013-ClaireMossAs Agile2013 considers itself a best in class kind of conference “designed to provide all Agile Team Members, Developers, Managers and Executives with proven, practical knowledge”, the track committees select from a large pool of applicants and prefer vetted content that has worked its way up from local meetings to conferences. I have only one talk that fits this criteria since I presented Big Visible Testing as an emerging topic at CAST 2012. I developed several versions of this talk subsequent to that event and doing so had given me confidence that I would be able to provide valuable information in the time allotted and still leave enough time for attendees to ask questions and to give feedback on what information resonated with them.

I worked to carefully craft this proposal for the experience reports track, knowing that if I were selected that I would have a formal IEEE-style paper to write. Fortunately, my talk made the cut and I began the writing process with my intrepid “shepherd” Nanette Brown. I wasn’t sure where to begin with writing a formal paper, but Nanette encouraged me to simply begin to tell the story and worry about the formatting later. This proved to be wise advice since telling a compelling story is the most important task. Harkening back to my high school and early college papers, I found myself wading through different but largely similar drafts of my story. I experimented with choosing a different starting point for the paper that I ultimately discarded, but it had served its purpose in breaking through my writer’s block. Focusing on how the story would be valuable to my readers helped to hone in on sequencing and language selection. Once I had the prose sorted out, I began to shape the layout according to the publication standards and decided to include photographs from my presentation – the story is about big visible charts after all!

Investing sufficient time in the formal paper made preparing the presentation more about strong simple visuals. I have discovered my own interest in information visualization so prototyping different slide possibilities and testing them out with colleagues was (mostly) fun. I’m still not quitting my day job to go into slide deck production. Sorry to disappoint!

Performance anxiety

Despite all of this preparation, I couldn’t sit still at dinner the night before my presentation and barely slept that night. I woke before the sunrise and tried to school my mind to be calm, cool, and collected while the butterflies in my stomach were trying to escape. This was definitely the most challenging work of presenting!

As a first time speaker, I didn’t know what to expect, so I set my talk’s acceptance criteria as a rather low bar:

    1. Someone shows up
    2. No one hates it enough to leave a red card as feedback

When I walked into my room in the conference center, a lone Agile2013 attendee was waiting for me. Having him ready to go encouraged me to say hello to each of the people who came to my presentation, which in turn changed the people in the room from a terrifying Audience into many friends, both new and old. I think I managed not to speed through my slides despite my tendency to chatter when I’m nervous. I couldn’t stay trapped behind my podium and walked around to interact with my slides and to involve my audience more in the conversation. Sadly, I can’t share my energy with you since I forgot to record it. Oh well. Next time!

The vanity metrics

  • At 10 minutes into the presentation, 50 people had come to hear me speak and at 60 minutes I had somehow gained another 7 to end at 57 people. Thanks so much for your kind attention! I hope I made it worth your while…
  • 43 people stopped to give me the simple good-indifferent-bad feedback of the color-coded cards (which I liked as a simple vote about a presentation) and I received 37 green cards and 6 yellow – with no red cards! Whoo hoo!

Words of Encouragement

Two people kindly wrote out specific feedback for me and I want to share that with you in detail, hoping to elicit some late feedback from attendees who might like to share at this point (Agree or disagree, I want to hear from you!)

Feedback Card #1:
– Best session so far!
– Great presenter – great information – great facilitator
– Would like to see future sessions by this speaker

Feedback Card #2:
Great Talk – speaker very endearing, Her passion for the subject matter is obvious.
A fresh perspective of how Developers and Testers should interact.
Should find ways to engage the audience

Someone else got a kick out of my saying, “I’m serious about my stickies.” and left their notes behind on the table after leaving. So thanks for sharing that. 🙂

One friend spoke to me afterward with some helpful feedback about word choice and non-native English speakers. When I was writing my talk, I was trying to focus on people who would be likely audience members, but I had not considered that aspect of the Agile2013 crowd. Since I was simply speaking off the cuff, I ended up using some words that would have fit in at our dinner table growing up but that would make for tougher translation. And yet, I got some wonderful feedback from Hiroyuki Ito about the “kaizen” he said I made. I can’t read it directly, but Google Translate assures me it’s good stuff. 🙂

uneasy truce

Finally, I discovered that my relationship with a linear slide deck is not a comfortable one. I wanted to be flexible in referencing each of the slides and having to sequence them hampered my ability to respond easily with visuals when discussing questions or improvising during my talk. I haven’t experimented with other presentation options, but I hope there’s an easy solution out there.

Image Credit

Big Visible Testing (Full Length) from Claire Moss

What I Did For My Summer Vacation – Part 1

31 Wednesday Jul 2013

Posted by claire in Acceptance Criteria, Agile, Approaches, Context, Experiences, Experiments, Retrospective, Soft Skills, Testing Humor, User Stories

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With the First Day of School quickly approaching, it’s time for:

What I Did For My Summer Vacation – Part 1

Exploring Requirements

I get really excited about hanging out with people, especially friends, especially a combination of new and old friends. So it was with great happiness that I set about organizing a geek gal weekend.

Our first conversations centered around budget (fixed), deadline (fixed), and features (flex). We started talking over the various activities that different destinations could provide to entertain us. Then, I paused the conversation to bring the focus back to value: when we looked back on this weekend, how did we want to remember it? how would we feel about the way we spent that time together? would features even feature in these stories we would tell? Instead of features, we realized that functions (what the product was going to accomplish) and attributes (characteristics desired by the clients) mattered more. (Why yes I was reading Weinberg this morning. How could you tell?)

Vintage gold lamé (see that gaw-jus totally 80s animal-print metallic finish? oh yeah.)

Vintage gold lamé (see that gaw-jus totally 80s animal-print metallic finish? oh yeah.)

We wanted to relish the simplicity of being together, whether wearing goofy vintage clothes (gold lamĂ© for the win!), cooking our own meals together, telling silly stories, or engaging in feminine activities with a geek spin (magnetic nail polish was not as simple as expected) that would be low-key and more about togetherness than busyness. We wanted to craft something lasting (collaborative artwork – packing the craft supplies was a must not a want!) and reinforce durable friendships that appreciated our differences.

With this clear focus in mind, suddenly the locale was much less important than inclusivity to maximize togetherness.

Planned For Sand

So we made an informal backlog of tasks to tackle researching options (beach vs mountains), reviewing results, and prioritizing options (beach!) before presenting our findings to the group for dot voting. (Typical agilists, I’m tellin’ ya.) Fortunately, we found a viable approach and went forward with making arrangements to execute this solution (road trip!), adjusting as we went to accommodate discovered needs.

How did it all turn out? Stay tuned for scintillating tales of laughter and danger in What I Did On My Summer Vacation – Part 2!

Ash-ceptance Criteria

29 Monday Apr 2013

Posted by claire in Acceptance Criteria, Approaches, Context, Testing Humor, User Stories

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Ash-2Weapons
Someone asked me for examples of testable acceptance criteria… Alright. Who wants some?

User story:
As Ash, I want to defend myself against deadites (undead creatures) so that I can retrieve pages from the Book of the Dead.

Acceptance criteria:
– defend from a distance
– defend at close range

Two distinct pieces of value, huh? Clearly, we need a story split here!

User story:
As Ash, I want to repurpose the stump of my right arm into a fearsome weapon so that I can defend myself against undead creatures at close range.

Acceptance criteria:
– portable
– well supported, weight-balanced
– hands-free operation
– use available materials
– holds up under stress
– close-range fighting

Technical implementation:
– leather harness
– chainsaw mounted on handcuff
– chainsaw pull operated via bracket on harness

User story:
As Ash, I want another weapon for my left hand so that I can defend myself against undead creatures at a distance.

Acceptance criteria:
– portable
– easy storage
– one-handed operation
– uses available materials
– distance fighting

Technical implementation:
– sawed-off shotgun
– uses right-hand-mounted chainsaw to saw off shotgun (story dependency or taking advantage of existing features?)
– convenient back holster

Bonus feature/discovered value:
– clever shorthand terminology: “Boomstick”

By now, the distinction between testable user story acceptance criteria focused on user value and the resulting technical implementation should be painfully clear. Groovy?

Tonight’s episode is brought to you by: the beauty of claymation, the number 2, and the words Klaatu… verata… n… Necktie. Nectar. Nickel. Noodle.

Image source

Rhythm section

03 Wednesday Apr 2013

Posted by claire in Acceptance Criteria, Approaches, Experiences, Experiments, User Stories

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camarolf-zydeco_tie

When I was a little girl, my mother took me to New Orleans. I was enchanted with the city and my experience there, not the least of which was experimenting with Cajun dancing and learning to play the washboard. As the New Radicals say, when “you’ve got the music in you / don’t let go,” so I suppose it was only natural that I decided to try becoming a percussionist in high school. Although I had the muscle memory for patterns involving 4 mallets and a foot pedal that garnered me vibraphone solos, I never learned to read music or march on the football field properly. In the Christmas show, our sleigh ride had a lame horse because I got out of sync and didn’t know how to recover, being an inexperienced musician.

Undeterred, I was always excited by the idea of playing the “toys” or strange percussion instruments that lurked in the back of the band classroom gathering dust. Sure, I’d tried playing a gĂĽiro, bar chimes, and maracas in elementary school music class, but the vibraslap, cabasa, and flexatone were new to me. Regrettably, most high school football game pep songs don’t call for that sort of thing, though indoor drumline competition allowed us a brief glimpse of the promised land in the form of tubular bells.

In recent years, my musical performances have been primarily vocal, though Michael Bolton can vouch for the my lack of skill with the bodhrán. (For the record, he rocks out on the mandolin.) And while I’ll never feel the rhythm of testing quite like Pete Walen, I keep my options open to try new instruments and approaches.

Telling compelling stories

One of the dozen books I’m currently reading is Edward de Bono’s Lateral Thinking. He mentions many useful ways to train yourself to become creative. I was thinking about these methods when considering the relationship between a user story’s acceptance criteria and the implementation that satisfies that need. In my daydreams, I am considering who to recruit for my next musical endeavor.

For every one with dollar signs in his eyes
There must be hundreds that look at you as if you’re some kind of
Rhythm section want ad
No others need apply to the rhythm section want ad
And here’s the reason why
– Rhythm Section Want Ad, They Might Be Giants

I immediately start down the list of musicians I know and don’t have a handy drummer to call. Then, I realize wanting to recruit a drummer is really just an attempt to satisfy my need for rhythm – and as I’ve seen with so many other performers there are so many more ways to accomplish that goal. If I’d phrased my requirement thus “As a person wanting to create a musical act, I want a drummer so that my song has rhythm,” I would have missed out on so many useful possibilities that occur to me when I challenge the assumptions in my own formulation of the problem and reject the dominant idea of a drum kit in favor of the crucial factor of rhythm.

By delaying my judgment, I open up the opportunity to brainstorm and generate alternatives to the clichĂ© 90s rock band pattern that jumps out at me. So the key to my dilemma seems to be figuring out the right acceptance criteria (or user goals) that will tell me when I’m satisfied and then chatting up several of my musician friends who can propose diverse solutions to my problem (e.g. a sampler could give me all of the above).

I might even take some cues from established bands I’ve had the remarkable experience of seeing live and in concert who made alternative choices for their rhythm section, feeding the wannabe percussion geek in me. OK Go performed a gorgeous rendition of their song “What To Do” using handbells during a show here in Atlanta. During a visit to a friend, I saw Tilly and the Wall, a band that routinely performs with a tap dancer on a box providing some fascinating beats for their music.

While I might pull out a slide whistle to jam with my kids or spin a ratchet on New Year’s Eve, I’ll never be a hippie with a djembe. (Who knows? Perhaps I can find someone to teach me how to play a few beats at the DragonCon drum circle or the Georgia Renaissance Festival.) At least I know there are many more possible solutions for my future projects. And though I’m still holding out hope for that next ridiculous musical number, you won’t see me on Song Fight! any time soon… that is, unless a Zydeco Tie shows up magically on my doorstep.

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