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Monday, April 29, 2013 - 1:00pm - 4:30pm
Half-day Tutorials

Acceptance Test-driven Development: Mastering Agile Testing

On agile teams, testers often struggle to “keep up” with the pace of 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. Get started by joining a team for a simulation and experience how ATDD helps build in quality instead of trying to test out defects. Then progress to increasingly more realistic scenarios and practice the art of specifying intent with plain-language and table-based formats. These paper-based simulations give you meaningful practice with how ATDD changes 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, CodeSquads, LLC

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 that provide a safe learning environment for new ideas. Nate promotes testing as a serious technical discipline.

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