Automated Acceptance Tests for Engineering Design (Executable Specifications)

Posted by Adrian Smith on August 07, 2008

Acceptance tests define exactly what stake-holders expect of a system and are therefore a critical part of the system specification. Automation of these tests has gained popularity within the agile software community, following the success of Test and Behaviour Driven Development, and are commonly referred to as Executable Specifications. The popularity has given rise to the development of a number of software tools that support the definition and execution of acceptance tests. As you would expect, there are also a range of engineering tools that support automated design verification. However, there seems to be some fundamental differences between the two approaches and a potential opportunity to improve engineering design by applying these software based techniques.

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