SeaSPIN Meeting: Dec 1: Acceptance Test Driven Development December 1, 2009

Food & networking from 5:45 to 6:45 (pizza, salad, soda )
Announcements from 6:45 to 6:55
Presentation from 6:55 to 7:55
Doors close at 8:30
........................................
Beginning with the End in Mind:
Driving Development with Acceptance Tests,
presented by Elisabeth Hendrickson

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 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 req

In this demo-based session, Elisabeth uses ATDD to implement a feature in a sample application, live, with acceptance criteria coming from the audience. Along the way, she explains the ATDD cycle and how it fits with other Agile development and testing practices including TDD, Continuous Integration, and Exploratory Testing.
.....................
Biography
Elisabeth Hendrickson is the founder and president of Quality Tree Software, Inc., a consulting and training company dedicated to helping software teams deliver working solutions consistently and sustainably. Elisabeth wrote her first line of code in 1980. Moments later, she found her first bug. Since then Elisabeth has held positions as a tester, developer, manager, and quality engineering director in a variety of companies ranging from small startups to multi-national enterprises. A member of the Agile community since 2003, Elisabeth has served on the board of directors of the Agile Alliance and is one of the co-organizers of the Agile Alliance Functional Testing Tools program. These days, Elisabeth splits her time between teaching, speaking, writing, and working on Agile teams with test-infected programmers who value her obsession with testing. She blogs at testobsessed.com . You can also find her on Twitter as @testobsessed.