BANGALORE, INDIA: When we first began the project, the customer prepared “stories” of up to thirty typed pages along with detailed acceptance tests. The plan was for the developers to use the tests to get detailed information about the story, but the customer would manually execute the test to determine whether or not to approve the story. The Quality Assurance Department was also supposed to run the previous acceptance tests on a regular basis to make sure that adding the new story had broken no previous stories.

The developers dutifully ran the acceptance tests by hand for each completed story, but it turned out that the tests were so detailed that it was easy to fail on trivial points that were not noticed. It also turned out that some aspects of the manual acceptance tests were subject to differing interpretations. Thus the developers would legitimately feel that they’d passed an acceptance test, but the customer would say that they had not.
Apart from that, neither the developers nor the customer nor the QA Department was running the previous tests on a regular basis. It was only by luck, therefore, that the development team would discover that modifying existing code had changed the functionality of the application. This state of affairs led NOLA to purchase a full-fledged acceptance-testing package.

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