Jean Tabaka passionately believes in highly interactive, collaborative conference experiences for helping people new to Agile embrace its practices. This ½ day tutorial drives a quick-paced set of 8 exercises for attendees working in small groups. From unranked backlog items, to fully tasked out stories, each exercise builds on the work of the previous exercise. Through these series of activities, attendees learn to collaborate and create great user stories that turn into tasks, estimates, and commitments. The tutorial ends with a retrospective of how to apply these practices in real life.

Agile teams practicing Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD) define acceptance tests collaboratively while discussing each story. This practice helps uncover assumptions and confirm that everyone has a shared understanding of “Done”. During implementation, the technical team automates the natural-language Acceptance Tests by writing code to wire them to the emerging software. In this way, ATDD tests become executable requirements. This session is a demo of the full ATDD workflow from initial discussions to distilling tests into an automatable format to implementing code to the final demo.

Why do testers on some agile teams find iterations productive and enjoyable, while other teams struggle to “keep up” with testing and get stories to “done done” within the iteration? Succeeding with agile testing is more than just automating tests or sitting with the developers. To create working software quickly, your whole team must be able to build a shared understanding of a feature - and do this rapidly, accurately, over and over again, every feature, every iteration. This hands-on tutorial teaches you how to use the agile technique of acceptance criteria to build shared understanding.