I’ve been teaching Acceptance Test-Driven Development (ATDD) for many years. At the start of every course, I ask the attendees for issues they have with their development processes. After they have experienced the ATDD process, including creation of acceptance tests, I review their issues to see whether they feel that ATDD will help, hurt, or be neutral in respect to those issues.

Here’s a sampling of the issues in the attendees words. According to them, ATDD will help in solving:

• Unclear requirements
• Missed requirements
• No detailed requirements
• Development without requirements
• Unclear business rules
• Poorly defined acceptance criteria
• Huge user stories
• Smaller stories leave gaps
• Not enough detail in stories
• Not enough testers
• Missing test cases
• Not enough time for testing
• Stories not verifiable until end of the sprint
• Test data not available
• Issues with integration tests
• Coding starts before tests are written
• Development team not understanding business process
• Acceptance tests written for coding, not testing perspective
• Communication challenges – IT is technical, business is not technical

If you have any of these issues, there’s a great chance that adopting ATDD will help in solving it.

In my book, Lean-Agile Acceptance Test-Driven Development, I have reports from many people on how ATDD has benefited them. Here’s a summary of those benefits:

• Rework Down from 60% to 20%
• Little Room for Miscommunication
• Workflows Working First Time
• Getting Business Rules Right
• Crisp Visible Story Completion Criteria
• Tighter Cross-Functional Team Integration
• Game Changing
• Saving Time
• Automation Yields Reduced Testing Time

As you can see, ATDD can benefit your process in many ways.