ATDD and Conversations in Paddy Power

Augusto “Gus” EvangelistiFull time Foosball PlayerPart time tester

The Start - The Good Stuff

Very good engineering practices• Unit tests• Continuous Integration• Code Reviews• Some Pair Programming• TDD • ATDD

Agile practices

• One team experimenting with Kanban

• Other teams doing Scrum

The Issues

• Teams not fully cross-functional• Contract negotiation and sign-offs• Ownership• Quite a few bugs in UAT• Focus on Quality Control

Why was ATDD not working?

I asked people: What’s ATDD for you?

1) Expressing the tests in Given When Then format and using a tool to automate them

2) Helps building an automated regression suite3) Testing technique4) Live documentation5) You use Jbehave and write automated tests

ATDD according to Gus

Acceptance Test Driven Development is about people, communication, collaboration and delivering business value

Amen

The People

How We Implemented ATDD in PP

Based on ATDD cycle model developed by Elisabeth Hendrickson. The Specification by Example concept is taken from Gojko Adzic

The Conversations

Example of Conversation

In order to encourage bulk buyAs a marketing managerI want to give free delivery for orders of 5 or more books

The lean Conversation

In order to IDENTIFY SELECTIONS in the CORRECT SCORE marketAs a Destination XI want to receive a Correct_Score_Home and Correct_Score_Away field at Selection Level

Why?Why do we send it?But customer A does not use system X and doesn’t sell product YLet’s ask why BigBoss wants to send it!

The Ambiguous Conversation

In order to collect my fares quicklyAs a Taxi driverI want to see my closest customer as a red dot

What we learned

Always seek the real value, ask “why?”If you don’t understand,be brave, ask “what?”

Ask “what’s the worst that can happen?” and find edge casesAsk the “shifty man” question, try to game the system