Songkick is a web based music startup which operates in a new market place full of unknowns, developing a free service. Focusing on user experience as one of the most critical features of the product. Continuously iterating and experimenting with features based on user observations and metrics. Unusually we adopted Acceptance tests and BDD while still in the early startup phase. Having spent more than 2 years growing our system and learning the pain points both technically and culturally we have lots of interesting lessons we would like to share about startups and Acceptance testing.

Ever wonder what it would feel like to be on a team doing acceptance test driven development? Now’s your chance. In this hands on workshop you and your team will be responsible for delivering a working web application. You will have to work with a product owner and designer to write and automate the acceptance tests describing the site as it evolves. At the end of the session you will see your cucumber features open a browser and verify the application for correctness.

TDD has long existed as a practice for ensuring that we are building the software right. While TDD drives design and quality, it is still a large jump away from traditional user stories and acceptance criteria that are created with the product owner. How do we bridge the gap between requirements and unit tests so that we focus on building the right software? BDD and ATDD are two more members of the *DD club that help align working software with the business through automated tests. This session will focus on the practices of Acceptance Test/Behavior Driven Development with hands on examples.

The BDD tool Cucumber is wildly popular in the Ruby community, with over 400,000 installations and updates to date. What most people don’t realize is that Cucumber works just as well with Java and .NET languages. This session will show you how to get started with Cucumber using languages like Java, Groovy, and C# for your tests.

Cucumber can be a powerful tool to build a common, or ubiquitous, language between product people, developers, and testers. A common language leads to common understanding and, ultimately, more valuable software. Unfortunately, too many teams write Cucumber scenarios that use technical language and miss out on this benefit. In this interactive session, you’ll learn how to use Cucumber to grow a ubiquitous language and how to refactor your existing scenarios to speak “business.” (While the focus is on Cucumber, users of other tools will surely see ways to apply the lessons to their own tools.)