Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD) in Practice
A 1-day class

This class is part of the Agile Testing Series.

Overview

In Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD), the whole team collaborates on defining acceptance tests as a part of the requirements process. Those tests become part of the definition of “Done” for a given feature or story. The implementation team then automates those tests by writing code to wire the natural language tests to the software during development. The result: the acceptance tests become executable requirements.

This one-day class covers the whole ATDD cycle, including Discussing the new feature or story, Distilling acceptance criteria into acceptance tests, Developing the feature and automating the acceptance tests, and Demonstrating the resulting feature to the business stakeholder(s) responsible for accepting it.

ATDD works best when the team has adopted one of the many available Agile-friendly test automation frameworks such as FIT/Fitnesse, Concordian, Cucumber, etc. This class demonstrates one such tool: Robot Framework.

Agenda

• Introducing the ATDD cycle
• A demonstration of using ATDD to implement a new feature
• Discuss: eliciting acceptance criteria and exploring test ideas while discussing requirements with business stakeholders
• Distill: expressing acceptance criteria as tests with expectations in a format that is compatible with the chosen test automation framework
• Develop: wiring acceptance tests to the software under test (shown through demonstration; this is not a hands-on programming or test automation class)
• Demo: demonstrating the resulting software, handling feedback, and opening additional discussions