Low-Tech Acceptance Test Driven Development
Presented by Kevin Klinemeier
“The customer does not like what we made this week” is a bigger problem than “The customer does not like what we made this morning”. But the natural inclination of programmers is to program until they are out of one of the following: time, features, or food and water. Much of the Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD) literature talks about tools for automation, for example Cucumber, Robot Framework, or RSpec. These tools can be a means to an end, but are not required and may be more of a hindrance than help especially when a team is just starting ATDD.
This low-tech ATDD approach is especially applicable to two kinds of transitions a team may be in. The first are those who are taking the first steps to moving away from a big-handoff approach and toward a continuous testing approach. The second are teams that are attempting to work more closely with their business stakeholders. Generally, this approach is useable for both legacy projects as well as new-development. It is appropriate in both the Scrum and Lean paradigms, making no assumptions about when the planning takes place.
About our speaker: Kevin Klinemeier has almost 20 years of software development experience as developer, team lead, software architect, and agile technical consultant. As a consultant, he has used this approach with teams as small as three to as large as twenty. He has worked in industries including telecommunications, global logistics, healthcare, and finance.
