Acceptance Test Driven development (ATDD) in Software Engineering

Prerequisite –Agile Software Development 

Acceptance Test-Driven Development(ATDD) :

• ATDD (Acceptance Test Driven Development) is a development technique that gives emphasis on the end users/customers by making acceptance test cases the foundation of development. This means it focuses on providing the actual required functionality/behavior of the system. In this methodology acceptance test is written from the user’s perspective and test cases are created even before coding starts.
• ATDD is extended on TDD (Test Driven Development) which gives emphasis on developers, testers, and business collaboration and it is a test-first approach. Also, ATDD is very much similar to the BDD (Behavior Driven Development) but there is a small difference between them i.e. BDD mainly focuses on the behavior of the system while ATDD focuses on the actual requirements of the customer.
• Some tools which are used for ATDD are TestNG, Spectacular, FitNesse, EasyB, Concordian, Thucydides, etc.

ATDD Cycle : 

There are four stages in ATDD (Acceptance Test Driven Development) cycle which comprises Discuss, Distill, Develop, and Demo stages. Let’s discuss one by one.

1. Discuss –
   User Story (What the customer need from the product at the end of development)
2. Distill –
   Acceptance tests criteria and Automation (Taking consider into different scenarios and system’s behavior during various scenarios)
3. Develop –
   Implementation (Develop the feature by following Test First Development TFD approach until it’s success/pass)
4. Demo –
   Prototype model (Provide a demo to the business stakeholders and proceeds with iterations)

The need for Acceptance Test-Driven Development :

• To avoid ambiguity in requirements.
• To develop the product smoothly.
• To avoid last-minute changes/modifications.
• To deliver a good quality product.

Key practices in ATDD :

1. Analyze and discuss the real-world scenarios
2. Decide acceptance criteria for various scenarios
3. Automate the acceptance test cases
4. Focus on development based on requirements.

Benefits of ATDD :

• Gives a better clarification on the requirements.
• Faster resolution of problems/issues.
• Improves collaboration between cross-team members.
• More focus on customer needs.
• Acts as a guideline for the entire development process.
• Easier to manage.