[ANN] DC ALT.NET: 2/24 - Getting the Right System with George Dinwiddie
The next DC ALT.NET meeting is taking place on 2/24/2010 from 7-9PM. Stay tuned to the mailing list for more information as it becomes available. In this meeting, once again we have George Dinwiddie, to give a talk on talk in the language of the business and what tools along the way can help us. Below is a description of the event. We hope to see you there!
This year we have a lot of great sessions in store including Mono, Domain Driven Design, Git and other DVCS for the .NET developer, more JavaScript topics and a lot more. If you’re in the Washington, DC area, sign up for the list and hopefully you can join us.
A ''Lingua Franca'' to Ensure You Get the Right System
The business tells the IT department what it wants. The developers build it. The testers expect it to do something different. And neither of these turn out to be what the business had in mind. Has this ever happened to you?
IT departments have always struggled with getting clear and unambiguous requirements. Automated acceptance tests that check the system with examples make a big impact on coordinating the work of developers and testers. Unfortunately, they’re often incomprehensible code to the business people asking for the system. What if they test the wrong thing? What if the examples are wrong?
Advances in testing frameworks make it possible to express these examples in the language of the business. The person commissioning the development can look at these examples and say, "Yes, that's what I mean." The tester can automate the examples as acceptance tests without changing the way that they're expressed. The developer can check the code as it's being written and know when it meets the stated requirements.
Additionally, the automated examples form the basis for regression tests in the future. Automated scripts alone can't ensure bug-free applications, but they can provide a big step up in correctness and reliability - freeing testers to spend time looking for more elusive problems.
In this seminar, you'll learn how you can develop a specification language to bridge the gap between the business and IT. You'll see patterns of these languages that are easily automatable as tests that can be run throughout the development process - demonstrating the progress being made. You'll discover open-source tools that can help you get the right system more reliably, and ensure that it continues to stay that way as development proceeds.