Acceptance Test Driven Development, or ATDD, has proven to be a very effective technique, both for driving and guiding development, and for enhancing communication between developers and other project stakeholders. But why stop there? Well designed Acceptance Tests can also act as a formidable documentation source and communication tool. Indeed, when written in a narrative, BDD-type style, Acceptance Tests have the potential to document in detail how the user interacts with the application.

In this talk we will look at the role of automated Acceptance Tests not only for testing, but also as part of the whole development lifecycle, from writing the user stories right through to deploying the application. We will also look at ways to make your automated acceptance tests more expressive and how to use them more effectively as a communication, reporting and documentation tool.

Finally, we will present and demonstrate a new open source library that helps developers and testers write automated acceptance tests for web applications using WebDriver/Selenium 2. This library also produces clean, narrative-style reports illustrated with screenshots that effectively describe the application's functionality and behaviour, as well as any regressions or pending features.

You can also download the slides here

From http://weblogs.java.net/blog/johnsmart/archive/2011/06/27/completing-circle-automated-web-tests-team-communication-tool