Acceptance and Story Testing Patterns

Acceptance Testing, also known as Story Testing, is a practice that can be applied to any software project, Agile or not. However, to achieve the Agile vision of “working software over comprehensive documentation,” it's very important that acceptance tests are easily automated, resulting in a phenomenon you may have heard of, called the “Agile Specification.”

In this presentation, we'll discuss eight different patterns of expressing acceptance tests so that they are easy to execute and automate. We'll talk about popular patterns like Given/When/Then and Specification by Example, as well other patterns you've probably never seen. Along with delving into the mechanics of each pattern and showing examples, we'll also discuss the most appropriate situations and team contexts to apply each pattern. Attendees will participate in interactive exercises that will teach them how to utilize the patterns, as well as how to pick the patterns most appropriate for the type of requirement being tested.Expressing Acceptance Tests up front, before development begins, is a vital part of Acceptance Driven Development and the executable Agile Specification.

About Charles Bradley

Mr Bradley is an experienced Scrum Coach, Certified Scrum Professional, Certified ScrumMaster, and Certified Professional ScrumMaster I. In addition to his Scrum credentials, Mr. Bradley is also a highly capable, full lifecycle experienced, software development team lead that prefers XP for good engineering practices. He is Sun Certified in Java, and has 13 years of experience in J2EE application development across all tiers. More recently he has also picked up some good C# experience as well. In his spare time, he enjoys driving his wife crazy by talking about Scrum, especially when he refers to his “honey do” list as his “personal backlog” and asks his wife to prioritize her requests. He lives in Denver, Colorado, and he is easily found on LinkedIn.

More About Charles  »