Acceptance Test Driven Development, or ATDD, has proven to be a very effective technique, both for driving and guiding development, and for enhancing communication between developers and other project stakeholders. But why stop there? Well designed Acceptance Tests can also act as a formidable documentation source and communication tool. Indeed, when written in a narrative, BDD-type style, Acceptance Tests have the potential to document in detail how the user interacts with the application.

In this talk we will look at the role of automated Acceptance Tests not only for testing, but also as part of the whole development lifecycle, from writing the user stories right through to deploying the application. We will also look at ways to make your automated acceptance tests more expressive and how to use them more effectively as a communication, reporting and documentation tool.

Finally, we will present and demonstrate a new open source library that helps developers and testers write automated acceptance tests for web applications using WebDriver/Selenium 2. This library also produces clean, narrative-style reports illustrated with screenshots that effectively describe the application's functionality and behaviour, as well as any regressions or pending features.

I recently gave a lightning talk at the London CloudCamp on CI in the Cloud. You can view (and download) the slides here:

In this presentation John Ferguson Smart discusses several case studies of automating web testing using BDD and ATDD tools and techniques. In particular, he will discuss an approach where developers wrote reusable web testing components that could be used both for their own technical tests, but also by QA to automated higher-level, end-to-end, ATDD-style tests. Using the Page Objects pattern with WebDriver, Groovy and easyb, developers where able to capitalize on testing efforts, and make it easier for both developers and testers to share and reuse the same web testing components, each for their own related but quite different testing needs.

Last week, I has the pleasure of giving a talk on Continuous Integration practices with Hudson. The talk went from automating build jobs to automating build pipelines, and discussed Continuous Deployment strategies, notification strategies, and general Hudson tips and tricks. The video recording of talk will also be online soon on Parleys.