Creating Maintainable Automated Acceptance Test Suites
Channel: Jez Humble
Date: 2012-09-25

MORE RECENT VERSION OF TALK HERE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9ap-zH0Gkc - Slides are here: http://www.slideshare.net/jezhumble/creating-maintainable-automated-acceptance-tests

Creating automated end-to-end functional acceptance tests is hard. Maintaining them over time is harder. Some agilistas even claim that the cost outweighs the benefit. In this lecture we present five principles for creating valuable, maintainable acceptance test suites. We discuss practices such as layering acceptance tests to reduce coupling between the test harness, and talk about how teams should be organized in order to efficiently manage acceptance test driven development. The core of the talk discusses how to manage the evolution of acceptance tests by organizing them as scenarios rather than as suites of story tests. Finally we show how to manage data for acceptance tests.