Introduction to Cucumber for Acceptance Test-Driven Design Course - April 1-2, PPA Event Center

[Paul Rayner]

Does your team struggle with defining and implementing acceptance criteria for user stories? Unsure of how to verify that you are building the right product? Are programmers and testers not collaborating very well, or are you running out of time to test new features?

Acceptance Test-Driven Design (ATDD) employs the approach of specification by example. Instead of talking in abstract terms about what the system will do, the team collaborates to create specific examples that specify what the system should do from the user's perspective. These executable specifications function as acceptance criteria for the user stories the team is developing. The team specifies as concretely as possible what the specification is, and then the developers code enough of the system to make the test pass to satisfy the acceptance criteria for that specification. ATDD is also known as Storytesting or Behavior-Driven Development (BDD). 

Cucumber is such an amazing ATDD tool because it’s so good at mapping stories and acceptance criteria to automated functional tests. Product Owners and BA's write acceptance criteria in natural language. Developers and testers unobtrusively automate tests for them. Anyone on the team can run the tests and see the current state of the system.

Attend the Introduction to Cucumber for Acceptance Test-Driven Development (ATDD) 2-day workshop in April to get productive with Cucumber and ATDD. Richard Lawrence and I will be teaching this course together. 

Full details and registration are available at http://bit.ly/cuke_apr2010.

Register by Friday this week for an earlybird discount of $200 off the registration fee.

Paul.