My First ATDD Project?

I remember when around year 2000 or so we were looking for a better way to make software in our small dotcom bubble startup. Somehow the traditional project model did not work. I do not think we knew the word "waterfall" then. First we found Unified Software Process and its commercial friend RUP. The idea in RUP that design, development and testing are not sequential phases but tasks you do repeatedly in a cycle during a project was just super. Of course the bureaucracy of zillions of artifacts and roles and the model driven madness soon turned us away from it to look for something else. What we found was XP.

And did XP sound just like a great idea! In RUP the actual software development was considered a triviality that just happened between the pile of UML diagrams and test plans. In XP the programming was the centerpiece with all its great practices like unit test first, pair programming, refactoring, collective code ownership and so on. And we tried to follow them all quite strictly. Unit test first rewired my brain forever. So did pair programming and the thoughts about simplicity.

There were not much tools around. Refactoring came in some version of Eclipse and I stopped using emacs. Builds we made with make. Continuous integration was done manually committing a task to a branch in cvs and merging that to the trunk at the integration machine. Radiator was a printout of the number of the unit tests in the code base in a font so large that it did fill the whole sheet. But we did all those things. And we were good at it. At least a lot better than before that.

Thing we did not manage to do well was measuring velocity and the thing we did not manage to do at all was doing acceptance tests. It just did not happen.

Our bubble blew and I went on to a one decade larger company with its own waterfall method for software development. I was in the trenches and as the management could not see me I secretly did TDD and CI (manually) until I got bored of it and started my work in Reaktor that already at 2005 was full of very agile colleagues doing Scrum and all that TDD and whatever. Still none of the projects that I was in had really any process for doing acceptance tests. I guess other projects here possibly had but where I was in certainly did not.

There were some system integration projects where there was no GUI so the integration tests were more or less the acceptance tests. And in the GUI projects tools like Fit did not look so suitable as we did not have so much problem in testing rules but in testing GUI interaction. We might have had occasional ad hoc or even some more careful testing by customer at the end of each sprint but there was no process, automation or prevention of regression built into our way of working on this level. Surely there was a lot of unit tests but as you know they are not for acceptance or even for testing purposes but design tools.

During the five years in my current job the role of functional design has increased in our projects thanks to our world class specialists in that domain and the simulation based GUIDe method. With GUIDe we get better product backlogs and realistic usage scenarios to test the software, cases that have been used for simulation in the GUI design process.

The number of test specialists has also increased in Reaktor during my stay and they can support more projects if not by joining them all but at least doing a lot of valuable knowledge transfer. Their ATDD 3rd degree interrogation method combined to well designed GUIs and the realistic usage scenarios have for the first time given me confidence that we can really do acceptance tests and even more than that, we can do ATDD or acceptance tests in the test first way (secret: it is easier to do test first than add the tests later).

Also we found a tool set that we feel quite comfortable with. Selenium 2 lets us write the tests in a way that does not make the tests break if we change the implementation from javascript to java or to actually anything producing a web GUI. JDave lets us use BDD vocabulary in the tests. Hudson runs the tests nicely with the different browsers in our browser CI machine. The project is young and the implementation has changed drastically but the acceptance tests have required very little or no maintenance after such modifications. Au contraire, the tests have saved us a several times finding we broke something in the system while doing our heavy lifting.

So, now ten years after I find myself in my first ATDD project. And I am happy. And no way, I am not moving away.

St. Francis of Assisi Was A One Lean Friar?

“Start by doing what's necessary; then do what's possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible.”

(Heard from the mouth of Jari Sarasvuo of Trainers' House)