Comments on: The Perfect Customer

By: Curt Sampson

Curt Sampson — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 08:51:48 +0000

I hear a lot of, “That’s too technical for business folks.” Interestingly enough, these objections rarely come from the business folks themselves, who seem fine with whatever technical stuff I care to throw at them, but from technical people.

cjs@cynic.net

By: Keith Braithwaite

Keith Braithwaite — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 11:31:54 +0000

@Lisa: If they are happy to write tests in spreadsheets, then why not use FitLibrary to parse them directly? I’ve had some success in stealthily getting customers to write tests themselves without realizing it this way.

By: Lisa Crispin

Lisa Crispin — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 16:14:50 +0000

The main benefit our team gets from FitNesse is this communication – we can express tests in the language of the business/customer. This is a great story. We have never gotten our customers to write FitNesse tests directly, although they will write tests in spreadsheets and we can convert them.

By: Michael Bolton

Michael Bolton — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 21:38:30 +0000

This application of the information obtained from Fit tests is different from what we usually hear about. Usually we hear about how swell it is that there are hundreds, thousands, of confirmatory examples that do more or less the same thing every time we run them, over and over. It’s unusual to hear that the customer learned something and used the information obtained from creating the test. (That’s not to say that it never happens. In my experience it happens quite a lot. It’s just unusual to hear about it.)

This is much closer to my view of what is really important about testing: discovering and revealing information so that people can make informed decisions. Most of the time, we hear about something different: confirming and validating information so that people can feel reassured knowing that last week’s tests are still passing this week. That might be reassuring, but it has enormous potential for self-deception. We need always to ask if our tests are helping us to learn, not just helping us to sleep.

Nice story.

—Michael B.

By: Exploration Through Example » Blog Archive » Good customer test story

Exploration Through Example » Blog Archive » Good customer test story — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 14:54:06 +0000

[...] Andy Pols: the customer who wouldn’t deploy without a test (via Keith [...]