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Writing story (or acceptance) tests affords your team superior communication, in-depth understanding of the system and how it should be changed (the requirements), and an evolving suite of system tests definitions. Automating these tests, in a way that is accessible to testers, developers and customers alike, will allow you to derive the most value from them. This course is about automating story tests using the Fit framework.
This course teaches the participants how to automate story tests using the Fit framework. Fit allows tests to be easily automated and at the same time does not limit the vocabulary available for the test writers. At the end of the course the participants will
- understand the importance of automating story tests
- understand story test driven development (STDD)
- understand how to use Fit to implement STDD
- know how to use Fit to automate story tests
- know how to use Fit as it is distributed
- know how to extend Fit to do exactly what they need
- understand test interfaces and how to reuse story tests
Defining story tests up front will have an immediate impact on:
- the quality of the software being written
- the efficacy of the development process
- the satisfaction of the customers and the developers
This is achieved by increasing the bandwidth and immediacy of communication within the team as well as promoting a rigorous process of requirements’ analysis. The advantages achieved by story test writing can be further amplified by automating them. This will allow the team
- to get a current, immediate indication as to the health of the system – preventing regression
- to get a clear indication of the completion of the task at hand
- to offload the tedious, repetitive functional tests from the testing team freeing them to devise and execute better system tests
This could be achieved by any automation framework, but there are other requirements that must be fulfilled
- the language used to write the tests should be domain specific and understood by all
- everyone should be able to write these tests
- the tests must be executable by all
Such a system is Fit. In this course we will cover Fit in details and provide everything that is needed to effectively use Fit to implement story testing.
The language used to specify the tests should be as close to the language used by the customers as possible. We dub such a language Domain Specific. If we use the customer’s language – the customer is able to understand the test and sign off on it. This means that complex script languages are not appropriate.
This also means that the framework used should allow the users to express their needs in the way that is most expressive for them. The testing framework should not dictate the vocabulary for the test writers but rather the other way around. It is the job of the technical team members to make that happen and interpret the wording of the tests correctly.
You should not be required to invest in large and complex systems in order to implement story tests. The tools used to author the tests should be simple and readily available – like a regular word processor. Likewise, anyone should be able to execute the tests to get an accurate picture of the state of the project. This includes the developers that can see firsthand on their own machine whether the system is working as expected or not, by running and debugging the acceptance tests locally.
It is a given in STDD that the developers are provided with the test before they commence writing code and that the test is approved and agreed upon by all. This means that once the test passes the team’s task is complete. This simplifies project management considerably because you now have an unequivocal measure of success – the passing of the test. Since the tests run on the developers’ machines, it is not possible anymore to check in incomplete or buggy code – the tests will not allow it.
Automating the functional story tests frees the testers to concentrate on new and innovative ways of performing system tests. This ensures a much more robust testing process that focuses on finding new defects rather than verifying that the old ones do not come back.
This course is for developers, and technical testers – anyone who is involved in the implementation of story tests. The team may work in one of C++, C# or Java, the course can be tailored to other languages. Attendees should have knowledge of the IDE and basic unit testing.
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