“Natural Language” Automated Acceptance Testing
Do you speak FIT?
I read with extreme interest James Shore's blog about FIT but was dismayed that he devalues automated acceptance testing. To claim that FIT is a "natural language" is wrong, it is a developer language and this is possibly why customers don't get involved. Concordion on the other hand is natural language and I think plays much better in this arena. In addition it is much more developer friendly.
I've written previously that for me the value of test first is the thought processes surrounding it, however, where applicable converting these into automated tests, and in particular automated acceptance tests is a huge win. I would love having a customer "own" the tests, but when this isn't possible (almost always) I will try to put my "customer" hat on and think like the customer and express what I'm about to do in their language (which will be English, not FITnese, or selenese, or rspec). If the customer is happy with my specification, I can then use this directly as my test.
So for me, the lack of customer isn't the problem, but I agree with James on one point, there is a problem...
It's the people... The majority of developers I've encountered can't think like the "Customer" and instead thrive on complexity. They can't express the problem or solution correctly and write tests that become implementation specific. This means they have written a test for a specific solution, where actually there could be a multitude of solutions, even in the same technology. When they then 'implement' this solution and the customer doesn't like it, the test can't be reused and needs to be 'reworked' (I'm avoiding refactored, since the test was actually wrong, and therefore it should be fixed, not refactored). This is the problem, the test may be rewritten many times at which point the customer will be thinking, this is now the n'th time I've asked for this exact same feature and I've seen five different versions of a test for the same thing, none of which are producing what I'm asking for. If I was that customer would I want to own these "tests" which seem to be so difficult to change and can produce such a burden to tweak the implementation.
So for me, if I don't know what I'm doing, I won't do it and will ask for help from someone who does know what they're doing. I would encourage all developers to have the courage to admit when they are out of their depth with a practise and seek advice rather than struggle on developing the wrong thing which ultimately ends up having little value.
I forever find myself coming back to the five values, and when I measure FIT against simplicity, communication and feedback it would come in at "Good, could do better"...