Completing the circle - Automated web tests as a team communication tool

Acceptance Test Driven Development, or ATDD, has proven to be a very effective technique, both for driving and guiding development, and for enhancing communication between developers and other project stakeholders. But why stop there? Well designed Acceptance Tests can also act as a formidable documentation source and communication tool. Indeed, when written in a narrative, BDD-type style, Acceptance Tests have the potential to document in detail how the user interacts with the application.

In this talk we will look at the role of automated Acceptance Tests not only for testing, but also as part of the whole development lifecycle, from writing the user stories right through to deploying the application. We will also look at ways to make your automated acceptance tests more expressive and how to use them more effectively as a communication, reporting and documentation tool.

Finally, we will present and demonstrate a new open source library that helps developers and testers write automated acceptance tests for web applications using WebDriver/Selenium 2. This library also produces clean, narrative-style reports illustrated with screenshots that effectively describe the application's functionality and behaviour, as well as any regressions or pending features.

A little about the speaker, John Smart...

John is an experienced consultant specialising in Enterprise Java, Web Development, and Open Source technologies, currently based in Wellington, New Zealand. Well known in the Java community for his many published articles, and as author of Java Power Tools, John helps organisations to optimize their Java development processes and infrastructures and provides training and mentoring in open source technologies, SDLC tools, and agile development processes.

John has been coding ever since 1982, when he managed to convince his father to buy him a TI-99/4A. He has an Honours degree in Computer Science from the University of Newcastle, and a PhD in Maths and Computer Science from the University of Aix-Marseille II in France.

John has worked in many companies over the years, as a developer, project manager, trainer and solutions architect, on a wide range of projects, and in a variety of industries. Originally from a background in C++, John discovered the internet in the mid-1990s and have been working with Java since 1999. John's main areas of expertise include Enterprise Java, and in particular open source technologies such as Groovy,Grails, Spring and Spring MVC, JSF, Portlets, Hibernate, and more.

You can find out more about John and his agile development training and coaching at: http://www.wakaleo.com