Beyond Legacy Code

Automate Acceptance Criteria

Being able to express requirements as acceptance tests creates another venue for a whole different, rich set of information. It helps developers understand the customer’s real business needs so we can write the right code, and it lays it out in a way that’s very readable. Acceptance tests aid in defining a system behavior and provide real examples as input and expected output. We’re no longer talking in the theoretical. Now we can say, “Given these specific inputs, I should produce this output.” It becomes tangible.

Concretizing the abstract is a critical skill for software development and the reverse, abstracting the concrete, is just as critical. Using acceptance tests to flesh out behavior and implementation ...