The second Agile Alliance Functional Test Workshop was held as a pre-conference session before Agile 2008. It was run as a series of open space sessions facilitated by Jeff Paton. The primary purpose of this workshop was to discuss cutting-edge advancements in and envision possibilities for the future of automated functional testing tools.
In response to the purpose the group created a diverse list of open space sessions:
- Narrative Testing – what is and how can it help.
- Why hasn’t Acceptance first development taken off.
- Tests vs. Specifications – what is we’re writing?
- Tool Clearing house? Why so many tools?
- User Understandable Tests vs. the Power of Programming
- HTML: ideal testing DSL or an abomination?
After a lunch the group conducted a “Futurespective” – a retrospective looking a year into the future. The goal was to identify things that we wanted to happen in the next year. The group discovered several big needs, among them articles that explain current best practices in functional testing and the distinction between test frameworks (tools that run and report tests) and drivers (tools responsible for translating the tests into the language of the system under test).
On the subject “Why hasn’t Acceptance Test Driven Development Taken Off”:
Programmers
- miss the fun / aha! moments / benefits that they get
from UTDD (Unit Test Driven Development). - there is a difference in scope and cadence of tests.
("Cadence" became a key word people kept coming back to.) - laborious writing of fixture, which doesn't feel as valuable as "real
programming".
Business People
- don't see the value (or ROI) from ATDD (Acceptance Test Driven Development)
- they are not used to working at that level of precision
- no time
- they prefer rules to examples
The session on Tools resulted in agreement to build a clearing house for Agile Functional Test Tools. Among many attributes the group decided to characterize tools by certain attributes:
- Test Input Format (XML, HTML, Java, Groovy, Vendor Script)
- Support for Writing a Domain Specific Language
- Test Target: Windows Application, Browser based, WinForms, Eclipse Rich Client
- …
Work is just beginning on classifying the tools.
Additional session notes: Tests vs. Specifications/Requirements, Tests vs. Examples, Narrative Testing and pictures are available. Finally Mike Debbo has published his as AA-FTT 2008 workshop redux, part 1 and part 2.
Previous InfoQ articles: Workshop Announcement and Last years workshop: “Next-Generation Functional Testing”
