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EasyAccept: a tool to easily create, run and drive development with automated acceptance tests

Published: 23 May 2006 Publication History

Abstract

This paper introduces EasyAccept, a tool to create and run client-readable acceptance tests easily, and describes how it can be used to allow a simple but powerful acceptance-test driven software development (ATDD) approach. EasyAccept takes acceptance tests enclosing business rules and a Façade to access the software under development, and checks if the outputs of the software's execution match expected results from the tests. Driven by EasyAccept runs, software can be constructed with focus, control and correctness, since the acceptance tests also serve as automated regression tests. Results of experiments with undergraduate students demonstrate the benefits of the ATDD approach using EasyAccept and show that this tool can also help to teach and train good testing and development practices.

References

[1]
Beck, K. Test Driven Development: By Example. Addison Wesley, 2002.
[2]
Reppert, T. Don't Just Break Software, Make Software. Better Software, 2004 http://industriallogic.com/papers/storytest.pdf
[3]
Crispin, L., and House, T., Testing in the Fast Lane: Automating Acceptance Testing in an Extreme Programming Environment. XP Universe Conference, 2001.
[4]
Andersson J., Bache G., Sutton P., XP with Acceptance-Test Driven Development: A rewrite project for a resource optimization system. Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Extreme Programming, 2003.
[5]
Finsterwalder M., Automating Acceptance Tests for GUI Applications in an Extreme Programming Environment. Proceeding of the 2nd International Conference on Extreme Programming, 2001.
[6]
Beck, K., and Gamma, E., JUnit Test Infected: Programmers Love Writing Tests. Java Report, July 1998, Volume 3, Number 7.
[7]
Mugridge, R. and Cunningham, W. Fit for Developing Software: Framework For Integrated Tests. Prentice Hall, 2005.
[8]
Exactor Homepage: http://exactor.sourceforge.net/
[9]
Miller, R. JAccept used for Acceptance Testing http://www.roywmiller.com/papers/acceptanceTesting.htm
[10]
TextTest Homepage: http://texttest.carmen.se/index.html
[11]
EasyAccept Homepage: http://easyaccept.org
[12]
Beck, K. Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change. Addison Wesley, 1999.
[13]
http://easyaccept.org/atdd.html
[14]
http://easyaccept.org/patterns.html

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)A software acceptance testing approach with accessibility for the deafUniversal Access in the Information Society10.1007/s10209-024-01171-6Online publication date: 30-Dec-2024
  • (2020)Teaching Practices of Software Testing in Programming Education2020 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE)10.1109/FIE44824.2020.9274256(1-9)Online publication date: 21-Oct-2020
  • (2016)A Comparison of Existing Tools for Evaluation of Programming ExercisesProceedings of the Second International Conference on Information and Communication Technology for Competitive Strategies10.1145/2905055.2905350(1-6)Online publication date: 4-Mar-2016
  • Show More Cited By

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Andrew Brooks

EasyAccept is an open-source Java tool: a script interpreter and runner that supports automatic acceptance test-driven development. Scripts are written in a client-readable form that represents testing at the user story level. The scripting language supports calls to a façade to the software being tested. Therefore, the developer must first create a façade, and then grow the scripting language from a small base of built-in commands to enable testing at the user story level. The evaluation of EasyAccept presents results from three groups of student projects. In the first group, students were not provided with EasyAccept acceptance tests beforehand, and a retrospective evaluation showed that only 71 percent of user stories were delivered with all acceptance tests passing. The remaining two groups were supplied with EasyAccept acceptance tests beforehand, and their compliance rates were measured at 98 percent and 99 percent, respectively. The authors conclude that EasyAccept is particularly suitable for teaching software development. The evaluation results are only presented at the summary level: it is more typical to provide minimums, maximums, standard deviations, and box-plots to convey experimental results. For example, in the first group, perhaps an individual project did score well. We simply do not know. The idea of using a façade to enable the writing and execution of client-readable acceptance tests at the user story level is to be commended. If EasyAccept is further developed and integrated into platforms like Eclipse, then this approach to test-driven development would likely become popular. This paper is strongly recommended to anyone working in software engineering.

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cover image ACM Conferences
AST '06: Proceedings of the 2006 international workshop on Automation of software test
May 2006
128 pages
ISBN:1595934081
DOI:10.1145/1138929
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 23 May 2006

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  1. acceptance testing
  2. automated testing
  3. test-driven development

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)A software acceptance testing approach with accessibility for the deafUniversal Access in the Information Society10.1007/s10209-024-01171-6Online publication date: 30-Dec-2024
  • (2020)Teaching Practices of Software Testing in Programming Education2020 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE)10.1109/FIE44824.2020.9274256(1-9)Online publication date: 21-Oct-2020
  • (2016)A Comparison of Existing Tools for Evaluation of Programming ExercisesProceedings of the Second International Conference on Information and Communication Technology for Competitive Strategies10.1145/2905055.2905350(1-6)Online publication date: 4-Mar-2016
  • (2016)Using security robustness analysis for early-stage validation of functional security requirementsRequirements Engineering10.1007/s00766-014-0208-921:1(1-27)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2016
  • (2013)Automated Assessment of Programming AssignmentsProceedings of the 3rd Computer Science Education Research Conference on Computer Science Education Research10.5555/2541917.2541921(45-56)Online publication date: 4-Apr-2013
  • (2012)Test driven developmentProceedings of the 50th annual ACM Southeast Conference10.1145/2184512.2184550(158-163)Online publication date: 29-Mar-2012
  • (2010)Development of a Software Product Line for Validation EnvironmentsApplied Software Product Line Engineering10.1201/9781420068429-c8(173-199)Online publication date: 28-Apr-2010
  • (2010)Review of recent systems for automatic assessment of programming assignmentsProceedings of the 10th Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research10.1145/1930464.1930480(86-93)Online publication date: 28-Oct-2010
  • (2009)A Systematic Process for Implementing Gateways for Test ToolsProceedings of the 2009 16th Annual IEEE International Conference and Workshop on the Engineering of Computer Based Systems10.1109/ECBS.2009.40(58-66)Online publication date: 14-Apr-2009
  • (2008)Are fit tables really talking?Proceedings of the 30th international conference on Software engineering10.1145/1368088.1368138(361-370)Online publication date: 15-May-2008
  • Show More Cited By

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