Gojko Adzic

As a community, we’re very guilty of using technical terms and confusing business users. If we want to get them more involved, we have to use the right names for the right things and stop confusing people. This lesson is obvious in acceptance tests and we know that we need to keep the naming consistent and avoid misleading terms, but we don’t do this when we talk about the process. For example, when we say continuous integration in the context of agile acceptance testing, we don’t really mean running integration tests. So why use that term, and then have to explain how acceptance tests are different from integration tests? Until I started using Specification Workshops as the name for a collaborative meeting about acceptance tests, it was very hard to convince business users to participate. But a simple change in naming made the problem go away. Continue Reading »

The next meeting of the UK agile testing user group is on the 3rd of August in central London. Here are the details of the talk:

Dan Leong on Clean Acceptance Tests

This presentation discusses how our agile team renewed our focus and understanding of our acceptance tests when the team members changed. Our group found some core shared values in the context of acceptance testing which we expressed in the style of the agile manifesto. We then looked at our existing tests to find bad test smells that we could learn from. The whole exercise was a good experience and we encourage you to try something similar in your teams.

Dan Leong is a team lead at Sky Network Services, where they have been using agile/XP techniques for over 4 years to deliver the company’s broadband and voice provisioning system. He has over 10+ experience working in companies ranging from small .com start-ups to global advertising and media companies. Like the rest of us, he’s trying to figure out how to do things better.

The event is free to attend, but up front registration is required. Register now

Creating an Executable Specification from existing manual test scripts might seem as a logical thing to do when starting out with Specification by Example and Agile Acceptance Testing. Such scripts already describe what the system does, and the testers are running them anyway, so automation will surely help. Not really — this is in fact one of the most common failure patterns. Continue Reading »

The long term benefits of agile acceptance testing come from live documentation – a description of the system functionality which is reliable, easily accessible and much easier to read and understand than the code. In order to be effective as live specification, acceptance tests have to be written in a way that enables others to pick them up months or even years later and easily understand what they do, why they are there and what they describe. Here are some simple heuristics that will help you measure and improve your tests to make them better as a live specification. Continue Reading »

Just got this question from a blog reader:

I am evaluating whether to use FitNesse with FitSharp for acceptance testing some web services.

In reading your book and searching online, I could not find a template or recommended approach to doing this. The following is a working idea on the approach. I would like to hear your feedback if there is a better means of doing this!

Continue Reading »