pragmatic agility
Have you looked at writing acceptance tests before implementing the story? I know at least one project at Thoughtworks is doing this, and we're trying to get at least some form of acceptance-driven development going on our project. It can start off with simple scripts hand-written by testers, then these can be automated when people get pissed off enough with a manual process. One big problem for us is that good acceptance-level testing tools for .Net are very thin on the ground. We have yet to find a decent solution to fully automated GUI testing, for example. Jim
In this project the acceptance tests are written either before the story is started, or at the beginning of the iteration. We had a full testing team that was doing their best to figure out agile testing.
RE: GUI Testing We were using Rational Robot and some custom built tools. We didn't use them for acceptance testing, but rather as a smoke test.
We are going through exactly the same problem in our project! We've been trying to implement what you proposed here as a solution to remedy the problem we faced. It's good to hear the solutions are working out for your team. -BH
For GUI automation try the following: WATIR <http://wtr.rubyforge.org/> SW Explorer Automation <http://home.comcast.net/~furmana/SWIEAutomation.htm> Selenium <http://www.openqa.org/selenium/>