Auditing a Spring MVC Webapp with AspectJ. Part 1

If you’re like me, then you’ll have those kinds of programming days where everything seems to go incredibly well. You write the code and the tests and it just works. And then and there are those other kinds of days, the really bad ones, where you know that everything you’ve written is as right as it can be and the code refuses to work: something is obviously wrong, but you’ve no idea what. I had one of these kinds of days when writing the code for this blog. The idea was to demonstrate how to use Spring and Aspectj to audit a user’s visits to a screen.

Acceptance Criteria Should be Executable

Having covered the debacle at Backwater Bank inc, you would have thought that my last blog had said just about everything there is to say about Agile User Stories. Well, that turns out not to be the case. If you take a look at an example order a cheque book story from the Backwater Bank inc scenario, you'll see that includes some acceptance criteria:

Title: Order Cheque Book
As a customer
I want to access my online account
So that I can order a new cheque book

Acceptance Criteria
1) The bank will only send out a cheque book if the customer is in credit.
2) The user can only request a cheque book if the bank has his/her complete address details.

...and acceptance criteria implies that there are tests associated with the story.

So, what's in a story?

I don't know about you, but I always feel a little nervous when it comes to writing Agile stories. I often worry whether I'm the best person to write them and if I've got them right. The reason for the first worry is that the agile gospel says that the best stories are written by the customers whilst, the reason for the second worry is that my stories will be reviewed by a number of people including various project stake holders. All of which got me thinking: writing a story, how hard can it be? So, I took a good look around to see what advice others could offer.

Some of this advice was often vague such as that in