Beyond TDD: Behavior and Acceptance Test Driven Development

I know it's summer, but we're going back to the classroom for our July meetup, with an educational event on Behavior Driven Developement. And, while this is the PHP Meetup, these principles will apply to any language and any development environment, so please invite your friends, enemies and co-workers.

Our first presentation is an in-depth look at the principles and concepts behind ATDD, BDD and HDD. David Bulkin is an agile trainer, consultant, coach, speaker and writer. He speaks locally and nationally and has presented on this topic at several Agile conferences recently. His talk will include some practical, hands-on exercises where you'll be creating testable examples that are language and tool agnostic. See David's bio for more info on him: http://lithespeed.com/bio/david-bulkin-vice-president-of-training/

For our second presentation, Anthony Shull of Rock River Star will be taking these concepts and demonstrating how they can be applied to a PHP project, using tools like Behat and Mink.

Some additional background:

In Behavior Driven Development (BDD), Business Stories are simple, compact ‘examples’ of the behavior of software. When placed at the center of software delivery, these stories close the communication gap between users, developers and testers. Business analysts derive Business Stories from requirements to confirm with stakeholders that requirements can be trusted. Developers take the same stories and use them to help design their code and automatically test it.

Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD) is a practice in which the whole team collaboratively discusses acceptance criteria, with examples, and then distills them into a set of concrete acceptance tests before development begins. It’s the best way to ensure that we all have the same shared understanding of what it is we’re actually building. It’s also the best way to ensure we have a shared definition of Done.

Confused? You'd better come to the event then.