The Deadly Sins Of Acceptance Scenarios – Mark Winteringham

Talk Description

BDD, ATDD, Acceptance criteria and scenarios are becoming an ever popular means of defining requirements, enabling collaboration, facilitating testing, development and checking activities. Yet when it comes to adopting these practises we misunderstand and misuse them to our team and to our product’s detriment and worse, as more teams make the move to use acceptance criteria and scenarios the common mistakes we make become accepted as the correct way to work.

The deadly sins of acceptance criteria and scenarios will challenge commonly held views made around creating and using acceptance criteria and scenarios, question their validity and explain why they are causing more harm than good, as well as how we might atone by changing our and our teams behaviour.

So if you sit alone writing scenarios as a means to create test scripts, or attempt to cover every boundary of a form field in one scenario, think that all acceptance scenarios should be automated to inform us we are delivering what the business wants then maybe you should find out if you are committing a deadly sin!

By the end of this session, you'll be able to:

Mark Winteringham

Tester, Toolsmith, Author and Instructor

Mark Winteringham is a tester, toolsmith and author of AI-Assisted Testing and Testing Web APIs, with over ten years of experience providing testing expertise on award-winning projects across a wide range of technology sectors, including BBC, Barclays, UK Government and Thomson Reuters. He is an advocate for modern risk-based testing practices and trains teams in Automation, Behaviour Driven Development and Exploratory testing techniques. He is also the co-founder of Ministry of Testing Essentials a community raising awareness of careers in testing and improving testing education. You can find him on Twitter @2bittester or at mwtestconsultancy.co.uk