Testing Experience Issue 16, December 2011

The issue and its guest editorial

The issue. Testing Experience was a free quarterly magazine in English for professional testers, published as a PDF by a Berlin testing consultancy and training company and edited by Jose Diaz. It ran to 28 issues between March 2008 and December 2014 and was free to anyone who registered. Issue 16 was the December 2011 number, the last issue of the magazine's fourth year. By then the publication had settled into a rhythm of themed issues, a pattern set in 2009 with security testing in June and agile testing in September, and continued with open source testing tools in December 2010.

What it covered. The one thing known with confidence about issue 16 is that it carried an editorial associated with guest editor Gojko Adzic, the author of Specification by Example and Bridging the Communication Gap. The text of that editorial is not reproduced or summarised here, and this page makes no claim about the other articles in the issue. A guest editorial from the best known voice on specification by example fits the magazine at the end of 2011: its readers overlapped heavily with the agile testing community, and the question of how testers, developers and the business should agree what a feature is meant to do was the live one.

Specification by example, 2011 to 2026

Testing practice in late 2011. Acceptance test driven development, behaviour driven development and living documentation were the subjects practitioners argued about that year. Teams that had moved to Scrum a few years earlier were finding that developer unit tests did not tell anyone whether a story did what the business wanted, and that a test phase squeezed into the last days of a sprint came too late to change anything. Specification by example offered a different order of work: agree concrete examples of the behaviour before building it, automate those examples, and keep them as the documentation of what the system does. Teams argued about whether examples were really tests, whether business people would ever write them, and whether the tools of the time would last.

How it changed by 2026. Specification by Example was published in June 2011, six months before this issue, and the practice it named was still contested when the editorial appeared. By 2026 the argument is settled in the practice if not in the vocabulary. The given, when, then form became the common way to write examples, living documentation became a standard expectation for regulated teams, and the three amigos session became a routine sprint ceremony rather than an experiment. What did not survive is the hope that examples would be written by business people alone; current practice assumes a developer, a tester and a product owner in the room together, and that is where the guides on this site start.

Where to read about it now

Where to read about it now. The acceptance test driven development guide gives the practice Adzic is known for in full. Figure 1 shows the discuss, distill, develop, demo cycle; the five-step three amigos session starts with reading the story aloud for two minutes; the worked example is a discount rule specified in seven example rows that cover every rule, the threshold boundary, the coupon and loyalty collision and the cap; and Table 2 sets ATDD beside BDD and TDD. The definition of done guide's story-layer table then shows where the passing examples are kept as evidence that a story is finished. The agile inspection guide covers the review practices that sit alongside both. All three are in the Agile Testing hub.

Reading the original. This site does not distribute the original issues, and there is no subscription. If you hold a copy of the December 2011 issue and want to cite the editorial, cite it as Testing Experience, issue 16, December 2011, and add an Internet Archive capture if you have one. The magazine hub describes the publication as a whole, from the 2008 launch issue to the final mobile testing issue of 2014.

Then and now

Guides that continue this subject

• Agile TestingAcceptance test driven development: cycle, three amigos, examples
• Agile TestingDefinition of done: layered checklists for story, sprint, release
• Agile TestingAgile inspection: sampling requirements for major defects

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