Instructor: Elisabeth Hendrickson or Dale Emery
In The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen R. Covey names "Begin with the End in Mind" as the second of the seven habits. This habit applies not just to individuals, but to software development teams as well.
In Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD), the Product Owner begins requirements discussions with expectations and examples, and the whole team collaborates to distill these into acceptance tests that define the essence of “Done." Modern testing frameworks such as Fitnesse (and others) enable the team to express the tests in natural language while connecting them to the software so that the tests are automated while the software is being developed. The end result is that the acceptance tests become executable requirements.
In this talk, Elisabeth explains the ATDD cycle and how it fits with other Agile development and testing practices including TDD, Continuous Integration, and Exploratory Testing. Along the way, she considers styles of team collaboration in the requirements discussions, describes the tools that make the practice work, and explores various styles of expressing acceptance tests. an overview of the entire ATDD cycle in which we implement a feature in a sample application by test-driving it. This session provides a high level view of what ATDD is and how to do it. It also provides a good compare-and-contrast between ATDD and TDD.
Format: this virtual session is available in both our 2-hour "hands-on" and "seminar" formats. See our virtual classes page for more details.