Collaborative Acceptance Test-Driven Development through Scenarios
The Test-Driven Development philosophy suggests that developers build their unit testing test cases before thy write the code then write code that basically passes those test cases. The roots of TDD go back to the concept of Test-First programming, which was part of Extreme programming developed by Kent Beck in 2003. Although it has been used by agile teams over the years, the philosophy, in my opinion, has not proven to be effective in delivering systems that meet user expectations. The reason, in my opinion, is that the method was used very much by developers without much involvement of those who really know how the system should work. As a result, it never solved the problem of misunderstanding and misinterpreting requirements or user stories, which we struggled with over the years. In addition, test cases written by developers are normally written using some sort of programming or scripting language that no one understood but the developer. Even in agile projects, where collaboration is strongly recommended, the practice did not really take advantage of this collaborative culture that is part of the agile framework.
In order to take advantage of this great idea and use it to deliver reliable systems that meet user expectations, we need to practice TDD in a collaborative environment where non-technical users, business analysts, product owners, UAT teams and other members of the validation team can collaborate on developing and validation those test cases. In addition, those so called test cases need to be written in a format that short, simple, and easy to understand by everyone.
In this one hour webinar, Dr. Hanna will give an overview of a scenario-based collaborative process the works for agile and non-agile projects. The process helps development build tests for Test-Driven development. The process also helps the test team build and validate scenarios that they can use to build their test cases for system and acceptance testing. Immediate benefits of the process that have been reported by those who used it are:
- Major reduction in the number of bug reports from UAT and production
- Maximum code coverage
- Maximum requirement and user story coverage
Dr. Hanna is a recognized educator, speaker, and consultant in several areas of software engineering. His distinguished seminars have been highly rated by software professionals. His experience with software goes back to the mid 1970's, when he worked as a developer at the NCR Center and the American University in Cairo , Egypt . Over the last thirty-five years, Dr. Hanna has worked in all aspects and capacities of software projects and processes. He has trained over 50,000 professionals around the world over the last 20 years. His passion and enthusiasm for testing, process improvement, and software engineering are contagious.
Dr. Hanna is Founder, CEO, and Chairman of several organizations:
- International Institute for Software Testing (www.iist.org), leading educational and professional development organization that provides education-based certifications to software test and quality professionals around the world. Dr. Hanna serves as the Chairman of Advisory Board for the Certified Software Test Professional (CSTP) and the Certified Test Manager (CTM) credentials.
- International Institute for Software Process (www.spinstitute.org), leading professional development organization that provides education-based certifications to software process improvement professionals around the world. Dr. Hanna serves as the Chairman of Advisory Board for the International Software Process Improvement Certification (ISPIC).
- International Conference on Practical Software Quality and Testing, (www.PSQTconference.com).
- International Conference on Software Process Improvement, (www.icspi.com).
- RommanaTM Software (www.Rommanasoftware.com). In this role, he is the Chief Architect of an Integrated Software Lifecycle Management System.
Dr. Hanna also served as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Software Test Professionals, a publication of the International Institute for Software Testing, now the Bug Free Zone (www.iist.org/bug-free-zone.php). As a professor of Software Engineering at the University of St. Thomas , he taught graduate courses on several software engineering topics with emphasis on practical software quality techniques. Dr. Hanna consults with companies to define and improve their software processes using disciplined software engineering approaches.
Dr. Hanna developed new approaches and methods in software engineering including the Scenario-Based Development and Testing (SBDT), Requirement-Based Project Management (RBPM), Software Quality Engineering Methodology (SQEngineer), the Unified Data Model (UDM), and the Data-Driven Object Model ( DOM ). Dr. Hanna and his instructors conduct hundreds of free online webinars each year.
Dr. Hanna holds a Ph.D. and a Masters Degree in Computer and Information Sciences form the University of Minnesota
