Testers and Devs grooving together ? easy

Off to Skills Matter again for another in their series of free events on Agile Testing. This time the event was Acceptance-Test Driven Development - Bring Developers and Testers Together with John Smart of Wakaleo Consulting

Not as many people as the previous weeks session and a different mix of audience - more developers than testers

I'm starting to get a bit of a headache with the acronyms - this was a talk about ATDD, there was a show of hands to see who did TDD, who did BDD and then the introductory slide has a bullet point BDD style Acceptance tests. Hmmm, so were we going to hear about ATDD or BDDAT ?

John did make the excellent point that one of the main aspecs of acceptance tests is that they are a communication tool and focus on the the what rather than the how

The talk focused on a tool called easyb. Seems similar to Cucumber that I saw last week, supports stories and specifications, based on Groovy has a 'before' feature to allow setup before the tests are run.

The examples used were the usual noddy ones - this time it was the bank account one, taking money out of a current account and putting it into a savings account. This is one problem I have, trying to make the jump to the projects I am working on and how the tool could be used. More real-life examples and stories would be useful - though of course if there is only a 30 minute talk it cant all get crammed in

or maybe the examples are real-life and this explains the financial crisis of recent years
Given a customer with $1 in their pocket
When they ask for a mortgage to buy a huge McMansion
Then approve their loan

As a big banker
I want to get a yearly bonus
So that I can keep my houses and cars going

Interesting talk though that made me want to dig out my Ruby book and play around with it again and try out some of the BDD tools. Only reservation I would have about the talk was that it was very much about easyb and very little on how to Bring Developers and Testers Together

Talk over and off to the pub for networking. Initial chat was about the range of tools our there and how to choose. Once again, back to the tools...

Thanks to Nathan Bain for organising it