The Value of Use Cases

I've bad mouthed them in the past, but the last two days have started to thaw my ice. While investigating a bug I discovered that an entire suite of functionality "done" last iteration was, in fact, a steaming pile of shit. How did this happen? We haven't added validation/acceptance criteria to our exit process. I came down pretty hard on the dev who did it, too. Not "leave them in tears" hard, but "are you a complete dumbass?" hard (obviously I didn't say that).

Over the course of reflecting and trying to figure out how not to have it happen again, some of the blame is not his. He worked the standard "hide behind the spec (or lack thereof)" excuses, but when when the app is writing data that is incorrect (i.e. a logger that writes you did something which is not remotely what you did) it doesn't take a genius to know it's not a spec issue. But I digress. What we really need are exit criteria - i.e. happy path use cases. Something that actually identifies in a concrete (electronic) format what it means to be done. Item will be added next sprint, along with developer-tester pairing.