Automate Acceptance Criteria
You can do acceptance test-driven development (ATDD) manually without the aid of a tool by just keeping track of the acceptance criteria for a story and noting when it meets the criteria. Automating the process is helpful but the real value comes in articulating the acceptance criteria ahead of time. It is estimated that more …
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Read MoreKnow Who it’s for and Why They Want it
Another huge benefit of acceptance test-driven development or ATDD is that it helps us get clear on defining features for a specific type of user. And it also helps us get clear on why they want that future. Why is really the key question. Why do we want to implement or build a feature in …
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Read MoreGet Clear on the Benefits of What You are Building
I have heard it said from a number of sources that the largest source of defects and the ones that are the most expensive to fix are our misunderstandings of requirements. Requirements are essential. If we build the wrong stuff, something the customer doesn’t want or need, then it doesn’t matter how beautiful our code …
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Read MoreWhy Practice 6: Write the Test First
I wrote Beyond Legacy Code to talk about the value of technical practices in software development. One of the most valuable technical practices for me has been test-first development and I really wanted to discuss it in ways that I hadn’t seen it discussed before that I found to be productive. Having exposed thousands of …
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Read MoreKeep Code Testable
I’d like to wrap up these Seven Strategies for Increasing Code Quality with a strategy that kinda sums up all the rest of them—keep code testable. Untested software carries a great deal of risk. If a developer who implements a feature test it manually only once then that feature may be affected by other changes …
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