Dec 16 2009
Is Concordion good for testers?
I got this question today from a blog reader:
They are thinking about using Concordion here. I remember you made some comments about using it. Can it be used sensibly by a tester without lots of dev experience?
Concordion is a great tool for acceptance testing as support for development. Whether it can be used sensibly by a tester without lots of development experience, that depends on what the intended use is. Concordion tests/results are HTML files, so anyone can read them using a browser. I’ve never tried to write Concordion tests using Word or anything similar, only by hand-coding HTML, so I don’t know whether tests can be maintained with a visual tool. However, anyone with basic HTML knowledge should be able to write tests as well. In terms of running the tests, Concordion runs within JUnit/NUnit, so this should be fairly simple as well.
Concordion does not have a test management tool and intentionally doesn’t allow you to reuse or share automation components, so it requires a fair bit of cooperation between developers and testers. I think this is very good for tests that support development, but it might be a problem for retro-fitting regression test packs into an existing product if testers are expected to do the bulk of work.
I wrote a review of concordion last year, which will give you a bit more detail on how it works. I also have a short video about it (.NET oriented but still a good introduction to capabilities):
David Peterson, the author of Concordion, spoke about it at the agile acceptance testing tools round-up event, and that video is also online.
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