Today in “Programming with the Stars” our task was to do “Story Test Driven Development” (aka Acceptance Test Driven Development). With just 6 minutes on stage, this was a pretty tall order.
Jeff and Joshua had suggested that we use tools like FIT or Fitnesse to create the story tests, but I thought it might be an idea to try using TextTest. I have an ancient Java application that I have used before to demonstrate how TextTest works together with JUseCase, and I thought I might be able to do something with that.
Michael was really cool about all this, which was great, because I thought it was quite a risk to move away from the well-known acceptance testing tools.
The most important part about JUseCase is the way it helps you to interact with the customer (domain expert). So we thought it might be cool to bring in someone to act as the customer in the middle of our 6 minute slot. Geoff was the obvious choice since he wrote the tools, and knows how to write tests in them already.
So in the middle of our performance, Geoff came up onto the stage for a couple of minutes. He helped us write a failing story test in JUseCase/TextTest, and then Micheal and I made the use case part of it work by adding a new widget. We didn’t get the whole test passing, but it was a start.
The judges apparently loved this, we got the highest marks of the whole competition so far. Wahey! Now for the final tomorrow!
(It has taken me some time to write this post. It feels like every time I sit down in the lobby to write it someone I have never seen before comes up to me and congratulates me or asks me if I’ve planned what to do in the final… this pleb-to-overnight-celebrity business is weird)
