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This article was originally published in the Summer 2008 issue of Methods & Tools

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Acceptance TDD Explained - Part 7

Lasse Koskela

3.1 The acceptance TDD cycle

In its simplest form, the process of acceptance test-driven development can be expressed as the simple cycle illustrated by figure 6.

Figure 6. The acceptance TDD cycle

This cycle continues throughout the iteration as long as we have more stories to implement, starting over again from picking a user story; then writing tests for the chosen story, then turning those tests into automated, executable tests; and finally implementing the functionality to make our acceptance tests pass.

In practice, of course, things aren’t always that simple. We might not yet have user stories, the stories might be ambiguous or even contradictory, the stories might not have been prioritized, the stories might have dependencies that affect their scheduling, and so on. We’ll get to these complications later. For now, let’s keep our rose-tinted glasses on and continue thinking about the simple steps outlined previously. Speaking of steps, let’s take a closer look at what those steps consist of.

Step 1: Pick a user story

The first step is to decide which story to work on next. Not always an easy job; but, fortunately, most of the time we’ll already have some relative priorities in place for all the stories in our iteration’s work backlog. Assuming that we have such priorities, the simplest way to go is to always pick the story that’s on top of the stack—that is, the story that’s considered the most important of those remaining. Again, sometimes, it’s not that simple.

Generally speaking, the stories are coming from the various planning meetings held throughout the project where the customer informally describes new features, providing examples to illustrate how the system should work in each situation. In those meetings, the developers and testers typically ask questions about the features, making them a medium for intense learning and discussion. Some of that information gets documented on a story card (whether virtual or physical), and some of it remains as tacit knowledge. In those same planning meetings, the customer prioritizes the stack of user stories by their business value (including business risk) and technical risk (as estimated by the team).

What kinds of issues might we have when picking stories from this stack of user stories? There are times when the highest-priority story requires skills that we don’t possess, or we consider not having enough of. In those situations, we might want to skip to the next task to see whether it makes more sense for us to work on it. Teams that have adopted pair programming don’t suffer from this problem as often. When working in pairs, even the most cross-functional team can usually accommodate by adjusting their current pairs in a way that frees the necessary skills for picking the highest priority task from the pile.

The least qualified person

The traditional way of dividing work on a team is for everyone to do what they do best. It’s intuitive. It’s safe. But it might not be the best way of completing the task. Arlo Belshee presented an experience report at the Agile 2005 conference, where he described how his company had started consciously tweaking the way they work and measuring what works and what doesn’t. Among their findings about stuff that worked was a practice of giving tasks to the least qualified person. For a full closure on their experience and an explanation of why this approach works, listen to Arlo’s interview at the Agile Toolkit Podcast website (http://agiletoolkit.libsyn.com/).

There can be more issues to deal with regarding picking user stories, but most of the time the solution comes easily through judicious application of common sense. For now, let’s move on to the second step in our process: writing tests for the story we’ve just picked.

Step 2: Write tests for a story

With a story card in hand (or onscreen if you’ve opted for managing your stories online), our next step is to write tests for the story. If you paid attention earlier in this chapter, we just learned that it’s the customer who should be writing the tests. So how does this play out?

The first thing to do is, of course, get together with the customer. In practice, this means having a team member sit down with the customer (they’re the one who should own the tests, remember?) and start sketching out a list of tests for the story in question.

As usual, there are personal preferences for how to go about doing this, but my current preference (yes, it changes from time to time) is to quickly scram out a list of rough scenarios or aspects of the story we want to test in order to say that the feature has been implemented correctly. There’s time to elaborate on those rough scenarios later on when we’re implementing the story or implementing the acceptance tests. At this time, however, we’re only talking about coming up with a bulleted list of things we need to test—things that have to work in order for us to claim the story is done.

We already saw a couple of examples of the kind of tests we’re referring to when we discussed the properties of acceptance tests. For example, you might want to peek back at figure 4, showing three tests on the back of a story card. That is the kind of rough list we’re after in this step.

On timing

Especially in projects that have been going on for a while already, the customer and the development team probably have some kind of an idea of what’s going to get scheduled into the next iteration in the upcoming planning meeting. In such projects, the customer and the team have probably spent some time during the previous iteration sketching acceptance tests for the features most likely to get picked in the next iteration’s planning session. This means that we might be writing acceptance tests for stories that we’re not going to implement until maybe a couple of weeks from now. We also might think of missing tests during implementation, for example, so this test-writing might happen pretty much at any point in time between writing the user story and the moment when the customer accepts the story as completed.

Once we have such a rough list, we start elaborating the tests, adding more detail and discussing about how this and that should work, whether there are any specifics about the user interface the customer would like to dictate, and so forth. Depending on the type of feature, the tests might be a set of interaction sequences or flows, or they might be a set of inputs and expected outputs. Often, especially with flow-style tests, the tests specify some kind of a starting state, a context the test assumes is part of the system.

Other than the level of detail and the sequence in which we work to add that detail, there’s a question of when—or whether—to start writing the tests into an executable format. Witness step 3 in our process: automating the tests.

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