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.

Concordion is an acceptance testing tool that enables developers, testers and business analysts to build executable specifications in free-form HTML. In this talk, I introduces Concordion.NET acceptance testing tool, the .NET port of Concordion, and demonstrate it with examples. The video was filmed during the third OpenSource .NET Exchange in July this year.

David Peterson on Concordion. Grab the slides.

Elizabeth Keogh on JBehave2

My presentation on FitNesse, TextTest and Robot Framework.
You can grab the slides or read the Robot framework review.

• JBehave
• FitNesse
• Concordion
• TextTest
• Robot Framework

You can download my slides from http://gojko.net/resources/skillsmatter_20090527_aattools.pdf. David and Elizabeth will probably publish their slides soon on their blogs, http://blog.davidpeterson.co.uk/ and http://lizkeogh.com/.

Thanks a lot to everyone who attended, and I’m really impressed that the room was almost full especially as we had to compete with the final of the Champions league. As more than half of the people were at the previous agile testing events as well, it seems to me that we’re creating a nice community and I hope that you’ll keep coming to future events as well. The plan for the next few months is this:

• 23/6: Testable Software is Good Software by (David Evans and Mike Scott from SQS UK).
• 22/7: Agile Testing: Tools and Approaches (Nathan Bain and Anand Ramdeo)
• 26/8: Fast Track Test-Driven Development – Testify your project (David Evans and Mike Scott)

All events will be free, but up-front registration is required for capacity planning. You can sign up now for the June event at http://skillsmatter.com/event/design-architecture/testable-software-is-good-software.

This mini-conference is free, but up-front registration is required. Last event attracted more than 200 people, so I suggest registering quickly if you plan to attend. Register on http://skillsmatter.com/event/open-source-dot-net/open-source-dot-net-exchange-iii

The line-up so far looks like this:

Ian Cooper: A First Look at Boo

Boo is a ‘wrist-friendly language’ for the CLR that reduces the ‘noise’ of other CLR languages. It’s also a favorite for writing Internal DSLs In this session Ian Cooper will talk about the Boo language from his recent ‘first look’ at the language. As well as covering the basics of why Boo is different Ian will look at the best way for you to get started learning Boo.

Dylan Beattie: Managing Websites with Web Platform Installer and msdeploy

In this talk, Dylan Beattie will show you how to kickstart your web projects using Microsoft’s new Web Platform Installer, and how you can deploy your websites and manage your servers using msdeploy.exe.

The Microsoft Web Platform Installer is a free tool that gives you everything you need to build and host web applications on Windows. It’ll configure your web server and database, install developer tools like Visual Studio and the .NET framework, and supports many popular Web application frameworks including ASP.NET MVC, PHP, Drupal, SubText, WordPress and DotNetNuke.

Scott Cowan: Spark View Engine

Spark is a view engine for the ASP.Net Mvc and MonoRail frameworks. It allows the html to dominate the view in a way your front end developer will love.

David Ross: Introduction to MPI.NET

MPI.NET is a .NET wrapper around the Message Passing Interface which is a used by the majority of super computers and compute clusters for supporting sharing data between compute nodes.

Gojko Adzic: Acceptance testing in English with Concordion .NET

Concordion is an acceptance testing tool that enables developers, testers and business analysts to build executable specifications in free-form HTML. In this talk, Gojko Adzic introduces Concordion.NET, the .NET port of Concordion, and demonstrates it with examples.

Sebastien Lambla: What OpenRasta does other frameworks can’t

Sebastien Lambla will showcase a few strange usages of OpenRasta.

Phil Trelford: F# Units of Measure

The F# programming language has full support for static checking and inference of units-of-measure. In the process Phil show its use with a sample of retro game Lunar Lander.