Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD) involves collaboratively determining acceptance criteria, creating examples, and developing acceptance tests before software development. ATDD provides benefits throughout the process, but requires skilled collaborators, automated examples, and testable designs for effectiveness.
Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD) occurs in a software development environment. Working collaboratively, the software development and programming team determines acceptance criteria, provides examples of those criteria, and then creates acceptance tests based on those criteria before beginning software development. This helps the whole team better understand the goals of the finished product, what the finished product should look like and how it should work. Following a detailed workflow, ATDD is a structured process, providing the software development team with a number of benefits before, during and after the development process. Also, to ensure success, the process must include the right team and the right methods.
ATDD establishes a consistent workflow that follows a specified format to ensure that all team members understand what is required to make the finished product work as intended. This workflow usually involves first defining the criteria, most often from the user’s point of view, and creating concrete examples. After that, acceptance tests are developed and run to see the failure results with the correct code based on these examples. Minimal code is then developed to run the program, more acceptance tests are run again, and the results are validated. Refactoring is then done based on the acceptance test results before the final program is developed for use.
The benefits of the ATDD method for software development are often cited among software developers and programmers, both for speeding up the development process and for ensuring a robust final product. In the planning stage, helping the development team focus on the right tasks is a major benefit. During the creation of examples and tests, the focus is further sharpened, while gaining clarity on the process and the problems presented during the tests. Throughout the process and with the final product, the goal is the stability and robustness of the software program. These benefits are usually achieved with the final product if the ATDD workflow is followed and the team collaborates effectively.
Getting ATDD to work as effectively as the method intends, requires the right ingredients from the start. The assembled teams must have skilled collaborators, they must be willing to collaborate and they must be well trained and disciplined to carry out the process. The examples created must be automated, efficient, readable, maintainable, locatable and measurable. If the example you create doesn’t meet each of these criteria, the testing and collaboration process gets bogged down, which can lead to the production of software bugs. Additionally, all designs must be testable for the ATDD process to effectively produce a concise, robust, and stable software program.
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