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- May 25, 2016
- Bits and Pieces
Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD) is a relatively new but essential practice in software development. This practice goes by many names, including Behavior Driven Development (BDD) and Specification by Example.
This practice is not to be confused with Test Driven Development (TDD) or other forms of testing. ATDD or BDD is something unique. And as it turns out it fills in several missing pieces in the software development process.
First and foremost ATDD sets the context for a vital conversation to happen between the Product Owner and the developers that defines, in a concrete way, precisely how a feature should behave. It establishes the acceptance criterion that defines when the feature is done. This is important for many business reasons as well as many technical reasons. It turns out to be an efficient and effective way of collecting and validating requirements, far more efficient than traditional requirements documents, which are non-executable and can easily get out of sync with the system’s behavior.
Acceptance tests also give us a way of calling out edge cases and exception cases. They can be informally jotted down on the back of the story card or they can be coded up using frameworks like Fit or Cucumber.
When acceptance tests are automated, you get a system that automatically certifies the expected behaviors of your system.
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