Introduction to Test-Driven Development

The practice of Test-Driven Development (TDD) is taking the development community by storm and is putting automated unit and acceptance testing firmly back on the agenda for teams who are serious about creating quality code rapidly. Using TDD, in which testing is a fundamentally important part of design and development, teams can experience dramatic improvements in code quality, flexibility, maintainability and customer confidence. However, even those teams who are already using TDD often struggle to extend the concept of TDD beyond developer unit testing. This tutorial, for testers, business analysts and agile customers, enables students to apply TDD principles and practices to steer their projects with acceptance tests at the level of requirements and user stories. Through a series of practical exercises, we enable students to translate business requirements into user stories directly supported by automated acceptance tests, which not only drive the design of a system but also provide immediate tracking of implementation progress.

For those who are new to Agile development practices, we recommend our 1 day course “Introduction to Agile Testing.”. To get the most from the course, students should have an understanding of the principles of object-oriented software design

On completion of this course attendees will understand the process of test driven development, and will have gained hands-on experience with FIT and Fitnesse by designing and specifying automated acceptance tests for agile stories. Through interactive sessions they will have gained practical exposure to the processes of:
• Articulating user requirements as stories
• Designing acceptance tests for stories
• Specifying automated acceptance tests using the FIT framework
• Managing and editing stories and tests in the FitNesse wiki