program selection system

This experience report will talk to Automated Functional Testing on the TransCanada Pipelines Alberta Gas Accounting program of projects. We feel that the story around Functional Testing is a compelling one to an audience of agile practitioners: 621 FIT Functional Tests scripts produced in the last module (over 23 months), Business is sold on the benefits of the approach to Automated Functional Testing; All future projects include automated functional testing; Business Analysts (not Developers, not Quality Assurance) write the FIT test scripts.

Other highlights: • Only a handful of functional defects found post production, none of which are major. • All of a story’s Automated Functional Tests must pass (run green) for a story to be Development Complete. • All FIT functional tests are part of the CC.NET continuous build process that runs in less than 15 minutes. • The FIT Functional Tests live on post production and are an important tool for the team that supports the system. • The FIT Functional tests do such a good job of a functional regression test that it allows testers to spend most of their time exploratory testing. NCover test coverage reports show automated functional test coverage to be over 70%.

The presentation will include live demonstrations of working automated testing project artefacts including FIT functional tests and test fixtures.

This will be a paired presentation. The presenters will be Stephen Marsh of TransCanada Pipelines and Stelios Pantazopoulos of ThoughtWorks. Stephen Marsh’s role on the project is that of Architect, Stelios’ is Quality Management Lead.

Parts of this presentation have been delivered to the Calgary Agile Methods Users Group (CAMUG Dec 2007 Meeting) and to the 2007 Alberta Microsoft Architect Forum (‘Architecting for Testability’).