On agile teams, testers can struggle to keep pace with development if they continue employing a waterfall-based verification process—finding bugs after development. Nate Oster challenges you to question waterfall assumptions and replace this legacy verification testing with acceptance test-driven development (ATDD). With ATDD, you “test first” by writing executable specifications for a new feature before development begins. Learn to switch from tests as verification to tests as specification, and to guide development with acceptance tests written in the language of your business. Start by joining a team for a simulation and experience how ATDD helps build quality in instead of trying to test defects out. Then progress to increasingly more realistic scenarios and practice the art of specifying intent with plain-language and table-based formats. This isn’t a tools session. These are tabletop, paper-based simulations that give you meaningful practice with how executable specifications change the way you think about tests and collaborate as a team. Leave empowered with a kit of exercises to advocate ATDD with your own teams.
Nate Oster
An agile player-coach and founder of CodeSquads, Nate Oster helps clients adopt lean and agile methods. Nate builds high-performance teams that adapt to change, embrace a pragmatic philosophy of continuous improvement, measure progress with new features, and deliver high-quality software that delights customers. As a coach, he inspires adopters with hands-on mentoring and simulations like The Kanban Racing Challenge, which provide a safe learning environment for new ideas. He promotes testing as a serious technical discipline. Though he’s a frequent speaker at software development conferences, Nate spends most of his time as a hands-on advisor to software product teams from startups to multinationals. He is easily defeated at all card games. Contact him at [email protected].
Even the fastest agile teams can struggle when we “test at the end.” As automation efforts fall behind, untested features pile up, and so does the pressure to cut corners. By contrast, Specification by Example “tests first” by writing automated specifications for new features using concrete examples in plain language. This collaboration focuses everyone—from analysts and customers through developers and testers—to the same definition of “done.” Join Nate Oster as he explains his skeptical journey from traditional testing to Specification by Example. Nate shares the hard-won wisdom and real-world problems of successful test-driven teams at startups through multinationals. Traditional test scripts obscure the behavior of your product with long procedures and technical details. Instead, we can briefly describe even complex behaviors using specific examples. At each stage of the agile testing journey, Nate illustrates how you can apply these practices right away with your own teams.