Shelly Park

The benefits and challenges of executable acceptance testing

In this paper, we argue that executable acceptance test driven development (EATDD) allows tighter integration between the software requirements and the implementation. We argue that EATDD improves communication between all project stakeholders. We give an overview of why previous approaches to requirements specifications are less than impressive and how executable acceptance tests help fix problems. In addition, we argue for multi-modal executable acceptance tests and how it can help improve the requirements specification. We provide some of the immediate research questions that need to be addressed in order to push forward more wide-spread use of executable acceptance test driven development.

Communicating Domain Knowledge in Executable Acceptance Test Driven Development

We present results of a case study looking at how domain knowledge is communicated to developers using executable acceptance test driven development at a large software development company. We collected and analyzed qualitative data on a large software development team’s testing practices and their use of a custom-built executable acceptance testing tool. Our findings suggest that executable acceptance tests (1) helps communicate domain knowledge required to write software and (2) can help software developers to communicate the status of the software implementation better. In addition to presenting these findings, we discuss several human aspects involved in facilitating executable acceptance test driven development.

Requirements attributes to predict requirements related defects

Literature suggests that requirements defects are a very costly problem to fix. Understanding how requirements changes influence the overall quality of software is important. Having some defect predictors at the requirements stage may help the stakeholders avoid making choices that could bring about catastrophic defect numbers at the end or at least be prepared for it. In this paper, six requirements-related attributes are analyzed to discover if they can be used for determining the occurrences of requirements-related defects. We measured two types of attributes: point and aggregate. The point attributes include time estimates, priority and ownership. The aggregate attributes include the number of indirect stakeholders, the number of related stories and the story creation time. Our analysis is based on data from the development of the IBM Jazz system. Our result shows that the number of indirect stakeholders and the number of related stories are good predictors for the number of defects, but other attributes show no or little correlation with the defects.

A Literature Review on Story Test Driven Development

This paper presents a literature review on story-test driven development. Our findings suggest that there are many lessons learned papers that provide anecdotal evidence about the benefits and issues related to the story test driven development. We categorized these findings into seven themes: cost, time, people, code design, testing tools, what to test and test automation. We analyzed research papers on story test driven development to find out how many of these anecdotal findings were critically examined by researchers and analyzed the gaps in between. The analysis can be used by researchers as a ground for further empirical investigation.

A Network Analysis of Stakeholders in Tool Visioning Process for Story Test Driven Development

Participation from all stakeholders is important in a successful software development project, especially if the development project is complex and has many stakeholders. Identifying the key stakeholders is very difficult in a large community-based open source development project, because a lot of conflicting ideas exist in the community and not all of the necessary stakeholders are represented in the discussions. We analyzed the homogeneity of the stakeholders in the story-test driven development tool community and the diversity of the opinions represented by the stakeholders. We gathered opinions from the agile software engineering community on a list of desired features in a story testing tool. Then we categorize the community using a social network analysis to analyze the consensus building process. The network analysis reveals that the community has several key people with dominant degree centrality in the social network and the tool development community is remarkably homogeneous. Our research shows that a social network analysis is a good way to analyze the characteristics of consensus reached during a product visioning process.

ActiveStory Enhanced: Low-Fidelity Prototyping and Wizard of Oz Usability Testing Tool

This paper presents “ActiveStory Enhanced” as a tool that enables prototyping user interfaces and conducting usability tests in a way that is aligned with agile principles. The tool allows designers to sketch user interface prototypes as well as add basic interactions to provide navigation. Sketching can be done using a mouse or stylus on tablet PCs. Designers can then export the prototype to a web-based Wizard of Oz testing tool, allowing test participants to remotely walk through a UI while recording metrics such as mouse movements and time spent on pages. ASE improves on the original by providing some usability improvements, improved browser support, undo support, more control over the design and an improved pen and paper metaphor.

Using Digital Tabletops to Support Distributed Agile Planning Meetings

Digital tabletop is an emerging technology that is being increasingly used to support group activities. Agile Planner for Digital Tabletops (APDT) is a tool that was built to support agile planning meetings. It provides interactions similar to those used in traditional pen-and-paper meetings. Previous versions of APDT were only capable of handling collocated planning meetings. In this paper, we succinctly describe the new extension of APDT that provides support for distributed planning meetings. A series of evaluations for the new version of APDT has been conducted, and the feedback tends to be positive.

Multi-modal Functional Test Execution

Multi-modal test execution allows execution of the same test against various layers of a software system, e.g. the GUI layer, the web service layer and the business logic layer. Multi-modal test execution helps with identifying the location of software bugs during debugging and maintenance as well as in tracking the progress of the development effort. This paper presents a method that effectively encodes multi-modal functional tests without creating large test maintenance overhead. Our approach extends the Fit table specification structure by multi-modal fixtures and presents the results of test execution in a way to help with debugging and progress reporting.

An interactive speech interface for summarizing agile project planning meetings

In this paper we present an autonomous meeting summarizer that transcribes an agile planning meeting and produces a textual summary of the discussion. We explore the issues involved in designing a speech-based interactive system that communicates with humans in a natural language. The inherent nature of ambiguity in conversational speech is overcome by suggesting a list of possible phrases to listen for. The system interacts with users in an interview-style dialogue for data collections. This is possible because we used the highly constrained structure and terminologies of agile planning meetings to make the approach successful.

FitClipse: A Tool for Executable Acceptance Test Driven Development

FitClipse is an Eclipse plug-in for facilitating Executable Acceptance Test Driven Development. The tool allows the users to edit acceptance tests, automatically generate fixtures, execute tests and represent the test results graphically including an option to view the test results history. The tool helps with regression testing because it can distinguish between requirements tasks that were never tackled before and tasks that were already completed but are now failing again. FitClipse currently supports GreenPepper and Fit framework.