Tools like Selenium make writing automated browser tests dead easy. Many teams never look further than this, and are satisfied with just replacing their laborious manual testing efforts with reliable Selenium scripts. They’ve missed a big opportunity.

This article from David Sale provides a short introduction to Behavior-Driven Development in Python. The article presents the principles of Behavior Driven Development and present the syntax of the Gherkin language that can be used with the freshen Python package, a clone of the famous Cucumber BDD framework written for Ruby. Freshen is an open source acceptance testing framework for Python that uses (mostly) the same syntax as Cucumber. A small step by step example is provided on how to use freshen and alternative tools are proposed.

This video presents the lessons that a team has learned from having a big code base of Selenium tests for acceptance testing. It covers different ways they have developed to track their tests across different projects and how this has helped them to identify flaky tests.

Unit tests are programmer’s best friend, but relying on them exclusively gives an illusion of overall system integrity. At some level, we need to verify how our components integrate and ensure unexpected behavior does not creep in when we shift the application into the target runtime. It all amounts to whether your application is providing the end user what he or she is really needs (tire swing) instead of what anyone thinks they need. How can we save our users from frustration, keep the fail whale at bay and communicate …

You might want to begin by choosing the tool you want to use when you want to introduce ATDD to a project or client. In this article, Markus Gaertner says that this doesn’t work and shares his advice on how to overcome the biggest mistakes from the beginning when you get started with ATDD. He recommends to start with an example. Working together, the team identifies a case that would derive the greatest benefit from being automated. You should define the right approach first, the right people second, the right …

Software testing is a major activity in any software development project and a large part of the budget is spent on it. If we want to effectively spend your money, the ease of software testing should be addressed when you design your system in the early stages of building your applications. In this article, Gil Zilberfeld explains that thee adoption of test first practices like Test-Driven Development (TDD) or Acceptance Test-Driven Development (ATDD) by the majority of agile teams shows how test automation needs are addressed from the initial steps …

SpecsFor.Mvc is an open source tools that allows you to create automated acceptance tests using browser automation, meaning your entire application is tested from the UI all the way down to the database, exactly as a real user will use your application. However, unlike many other solutions which rely on recording actions or require you to learn a completely new framework and syntax, SpecsFor.Mvc uses familiar unit-testing tools and syntax.

In this blog post, Mark Barne shares some useful tips and techniques to challenge those attempting to adopt acceptance test driven development within a corporate environment. Amongst the tips that I liked the best I will mention “Don’t clean up after tests”. Leaving the data created by the test can help immensely when issues are found. “Create unique contexts for each test”. To prevent tests stepping on each other’s toes if they are run in parallel, create a unique context for the test. “Don’t write the test at all.” If …

For Node, there are two types of automated testing: unit testing and acceptance testing. Unit testing tests code logic directly and is applicable to all types of applications. Acceptance testing, however, is an additional layer of testing most commonly used for web applications. This article discusses the Tobi and Soda frameworks for acceptance testing.

This blog post provides a detail process on how to write  acceptance tests for the UI using Visual Studio 2010 Microsoft Test Manager and Fit style tables.  Fit tables, originally defined for the fitnesse open source software testing tool, allow stakeholders and business analysts to enter expected input and the proper output in a tool they are comfortable wit, like word processor or a spreadsheet.