Re^3: TDD in perl

Extreme Programming relies on acceptance tests just as much as unit tests. You can't do XP without them.

Quite true. What I meant to emphasise was that IXP explicity tests User Stories as part of the process. XP, at least as I've seen it practiced, tends to treat user stories as gospel. Only the downstream products gets sanity tested.

By forcing stakeholders to be explicit up-front with their acceptance tests, some nonsense in stories gets shaken out early.

Comment on Re^3: TDD in perl

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Re^4: TDD in perl by adrianh (Chancellor) on Oct 29, 2003 at 17:02 UTC
Belated response :-) What I meant to emphasise was that IXP explicity tests User Stories as part of the process. XP, at least as I've seen it practiced, tends to treat user stories as gospel. Only the downstream products gets sanity tested. What do you mean by "tests User Stories as part of the process"? Unless I'm missing something there aren't any IXP practices for testing code that aren't already in plain XP.	[reply]
Re^4: TDD in perl by dws (Chancellor) on Oct 30, 2003 at 03:52 UTC
What do you mean by "tests User Stories as part of the process"? Unless I'm missing something there aren't any IXP practices for testing code that aren't already in plain XP. Stories aren't (yet) code. I based my statement on a presentation by the folks behind Industrial XP. If you look at the http://www.industrialxp.com, you'll see "Story Testing" on the 'X'. Unfortunately, they haven't fleshed out the description, but it essentially had to do with heavy sanity testing of stories before then turned into actionable tasks.	[reply]
Re^5: TDD in perl by adrianh (Chancellor) on Oct 30, 2003 at 16:23 UTC
I based my statement on a presentation by the folks behind Industrial XP. If you look at the http://www.industrialxp.com, you'll see "Story Testing" on the 'X'. Ah - light dawns :-) As I understand it storytesting (IXP people like it to be one word) is the process of elucidating acceptance tests from the client - but not actually writing them. So the difference from vanilla XP is that IXP is making an implicit task (you need to define acceptance tests for a story in the planning game) an explicit one - which makes sense. Seems a practice that would be suited to QA people. So it's not so much about testing stories, as it is about finding out what needs to be done to test stories (which is at the heart of XP and IXP). However I've never been to an IXP presentation, and IXP itself seems to be in flux, so I may well be completely wrong here :-) Keith Ray wrote a nice summary of IXPs practices that might be of interest. Personally I can't wait for somebody to write more about their Iterative Usability practice. Since I wear a usability hat on occasion I'm spending quite a lot of time trying to integrate good UI design practices into agile development strategies - which is proving non-trivial :-)	[reply]