Acceptance Test Driven Development(ATDD)

Introduction

Test-driven development and acceptance test-driven development (ATDD) share a common trait: team members from development, testing, and customer perspectives work together to create acceptance tests prior to deploying the corresponding functionality. The three perspectives of the client (what problem are we trying to solve? ), development (how might we address this problem? ), and testing (what about...) are reflected in the collaborative discussions that take place while building the acceptance test, generally known as the "three amigos."

In addition to demonstrating the user's perspective, these acceptance tests act as a kind of specification to specify how the system will operate and as a means of confirming that the system functions as planned. The team may automate the acceptance testing in some circumstances.

Acceptance Test Driven Development(ATDD)

ATDD, as the name implies, is connected to TDD, or Test-Driven Development. It is also associated with approaches such as Behavior-driven development (BDD) and Specification by Example (SBE).

What is Acceptance Test Driven Development?

Let us first discuss what ATDD is not. In spite of its name, this is not a method of testing. On the other side, acceptance test-driven development is a programming methodology. ATDD places a high priority on test automation, just as its "cousin" TDD does. When it is implemented, teams will employ automated test cases to guide the development of production code.

Acceptance Test Driven Development(ATDD)

ATDD is a collaborative effort that unites testers, engineers, and business stakeholders to collaborate throughout the software development process, in contrast to TDD, which is commonly thought of as an engineering technique. The result of this collaboration is the application's requirements, articulated in a format that everyone can understand, which are subsequently transformed into automated acceptance tests.

What is The Main Goal of Acceptance Test Driven Development?

The goal of ATDD is to foster a collaborative environment that yields a common understanding of the system requirements expressed in simple English specifications. After that, the specifications are converted into automated acceptance test cases. What is the advantage of doing so?

First, consider unit testing to see why that's useful. This type of testing is heavily developer-centric by design. It enables developers to document their code assumptions in executable format. Unit testing addresses the question, "Are we building the thing correctly?"

Unit tests, on the other hand, do not address the question, "Are we building the right thing?" Acceptance testing, which evaluates the workings of the application against a set of acceptance criteria found through conversations with a domain expert, would be required for that.

Acceptance Test Driven Development(ATDD)

Acceptance testing, which evaluates the workings of the application against a set of acceptance criteria found through interactions with a domain expert, would be required.

The issue of the development team deploying features that don't meet the needs of the customer is essentially resolved by acceptance-test-driven development.

Automation is a critical component of ATDD: the specifications developed during the discussions are converted into executable tests that guarantee software engineers implement the features in accordance with the requirements.

Brief History

Kent Beck briefly addresses ATDD-which he names Application Test-Driven Development-in his famous book "Test-driven Development: By Example," first published in 2000, but dismisses the idea.

Nonetheless, the method gained stream owing to the success of applications such as Fit and Fitnesse.

Dan North created the concept of behavior-driven development in 2006, which was originally intended to replace parts of the TDD vocabulary but evolved into requirement analysis. BDD and ATDD share many similarities, and over time, much of the former's vocabulary, tools, and techniques have been adopted by the latter.

How Does It Work / Principles and Practices?

A General Overview of ATDD

Acceptance test-driven development follows a similar workflow to TDD in that tests are written before production code. ATDD tests are acceptance tests, as opposed to TDD tests, which are unit tests. Testers, developers, and clients or business stakeholders have discussions that result in requirements, which then provide the basis for the tests.

Acceptance Test Driven Development(ATDD)

After the creation of the tests, developers write code to ensure that the tests pass, implementing the functionality as specified.

In this manner, you not only have thorough specifications that everyone, regardless of coding skills, can comprehend and contribute to, but you also assure that the developers construct what the customer requires.

Acceptance Test-driven Development Cycle

While there isn't universal agreement on the phases of the acceptance test-driven development cycle, these four processes are frequently seen: discuss, distill, develop, and demo.

1. Discuss

As is the case with almost all agile methodologies or frameworks, testers, and developers will gather as much information from stakeholders, product owners, and clients by discussing the tasks and user stories chosen for implementation in the upcoming iteration or sprint during the planning meeting.

The team can clear up any confusion regarding the requirements during the discussion process. This can help the team avoid having to debug, diagnose, and resolve bugs later on in the program, saving a big sum of money.

Moreover, the team may discover during the "discuss" step that a user story that appeared to be straightforward is actually far more intricate. The team and the business stakeholder may decide to divide the tale into two or more stories in such a situation.

Acceptance tests in the form of easily understandable tables or plain English phrases are the result of this step and are available to all members of the organization.

2. Distill

The tests created in the previous stage must be converted into a format that is compatible with the acceptance testing tool you are currently using in the second phase. These formats vary based on the tool and include:

tables

wiki pages

or even code in a DSL (domain-specific language.)

Thus, the acceptance tests are the output of this step. But, as you'll see, they're not yet prepared for action.

3. Develop

The test generated in the previous step is now unable to effectively test the system that is being tested. At this point, they are only skeletons; you must connect them to real test code that will run application code.

The specific tools being used determine how this wiring is configured. To put it simply, the tests will not pass after the wiring is finished since the functionality they are testing is not yet available.

The feature is then put into use by the developers in accordance with the requirements that were acquired during the "discuss" phase and turned into tests during the "distill" phase.

4. Demo

Developers demonstrate the feature to stakeholders after it has been implemented. Many agile approaches include the extremely popular practice of holding a meeting at the conclusion of each cycle when the team reviews the product and/or how to improve the process itself. Thus, that aligns well with the ATDD demo phase.

Once the implementation is finished, manual exploratory testing can also be carried out by testers. These tests can identify flaws as well as opportunities for improvement, which can lead to the creation of further stories.

Acceptance Test-driven Development vs. Test-Driven Development

It's common to compare test-driven development with acceptance test-driven development. They are obviously related, but what similarities exist between the two?

Under the test-driven development (TDD) methodology, developers write a unit test that fails before moving on to create the production code necessary to pass the test.

The goal of TDD is to produce simple, clean code that is made up of loosely connected modules for increased maintainability. Nonetheless, TDD is a developer-centric methodology that depends on unit testing. As seen, unit testing may result in the issue of appropriately implementing the incorrect functionalities.

Instead of focusing solely on the developer, ATDD promotes cooperation between developers and other team members-even those who aren't programmers.

Together, TDD and ATDD can and should be used. Create automated acceptance tests at the beginning of each iteration based on the domain expert's advice.

Using test-driven development (TDD), test-drive the development of the production code before it is actually implemented. To put it another way, TDD can be used as an "internal" cycle within the overall ATDD stages.

The need for Acceptance Test-Driven Development :

  1. To ensure that the requirements are crystal clear.
  2. To ensure the product develops smoothly.
  3. To avoid alterations or modifications at the last minute.
  4. To deliver a superior product.

Key practices in ATDD:

  1. Analyse and discuss real-world scenarios.
  2. Establish acceptance standards for different situations.
  3. Automate the cases for the acceptance tests.
  4. Concentrate on requirements-based development.

Benefits of ATDD :

  1. Clarify the requirements more clearly.
  2. Quicker resolution of concerns or problems.
  3. Enhances collaboration amongst team members.
  4. A greater focus on client needs.
  5. It serves as a roadmap for all stages of the development process.
  6. Simpler to manage.





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