The practice of agile software development requires a clear understanding of business needs. Misunderstanding requirements causes waste, slipped schedules, and mistrust within the organization. Jared Richardson shows how good acceptance tests can reduce misunderstanding of requirements. A testable requirement provides a single source that serves as the analysis document, acceptance criteria, regression test suite, and progress-tracker for any given feature. Jared explores the creation, evaluation, and use of testable requirements by the business and developers. Learn how to transform requirements into stories—small units of work—that have business value, small implementation effort, and easy to understand acceptance tests. This tutorial features an interactive exercise that starts with a high level feature, decomposes it into stories, applies acceptance tests to those stories, and estimates the stories for business value and implementation effort. The exercise demonstrates how big requirement stories can be decomposed into business-facing stories, rather than technical tasks that are not understood by the business.
Jared Richardson
Principal consultant and a member of the core team at Agile Artisans, Jared Richardson works with other software craftsmen to build excellent custom software. He sold his first software program in 1991 and has been immersed in software ever since. Jared has authored and coauthored a number of books, including the best selling Ship It! A Practical Guide to Successful Software Projects and Career 2.0: Take Control of Your Life. He is a frequent speaker at software conferences and a thought leader in agile. Jared lives with his wife and children in North Carolina where they recently, quite by accident, became backyard chicken farmers. He's on the web at AgileArtisans.com.
Today’s test organizations often have sizable investments in test automation. Unfortunately, running and maintaining these test suites represents another sizable investment. All too often this hard work is abandoned and teams revert to a more costly, but familiar, manual approach. Jared Richardson says a more practical solution is to integrate test automation suites with continuous integration (CI). A CI system monitors your source code and compiles the system after every change. Once the build is complete, test suites are automatically run. This approach of ongoing test execution provides your developers rapid feedback and keeps your tests in constant use. It also frees up your testers for more involved exploratory testing. Jared shows how to set up an open source continuous integration tool and explains the best way to introduce this technique to your developers and testers. The concepts are simple when presented properly and provide solid benefits to all areas of an organization.