Hi Mike--

As dumb as this sounds, I had an epiphany a few years ago when I
realized that the goal is to "iterate everything all the time."
Iterate the code and iterate the tests.

I like to start a sprint with a user story plus the high level
acceptance tests (or "conditions of satisfaction" for the story). The
programmer starts iterating the code in short code-and-test cycles
(or preferably test-then-code cycles if doing TDD). While she's doing
this, the tester is iterating over the high level tests--that is,
making them specific (so instead of "test it with a big number" he
makes a test to test the feature with 4,000,001). While the tester is
iterating over the tests (adding detail, making tests specific) he is
also automating those tests.

Ideally at the end of the day, the programmer and tester have a bit
of working code done and the tests automated that go with that code.
(For example, the feature works but only with positive numbers.) That
code is checked in for the nightly build. The next morning, they
continue to iterate, perhaps adding support for negative numbers that
day in both the code and its tests.

In this way, there really aren't tests to deprecate.

Regards,
Mike Cohn
Author:
Agile Estimating and Planning
User Stories Applied
www.mountaingoatsoftware.com


On Dec 12, 2005, at 8:38 PM, mpkirby@... wrote:

> So I'm in the midst of a project. We've got a number of
> iterations, and my customer has
> given me some embryonic stories. Very simple ones, with customer
> acceptance tests. For
> reasons related to our domain the acceptance tests are not
> automatically run, but we have a
> test group that will run them on completion of the iteration, as
> well as periodically through
> the development to ensure we don't have regression loss.
>
> The question is that as my embryonic stories turn into more fully
> featured ones, do we go
> back and update the old test cases? Do we create new ones? Do we
> deprecate the old
> ones, and tell the test groups only to run the new ones?
>
> I don't want to create a morass of unusable test cases, but I worry
> that the test cases
> themselves will become a maintenance headache.
>
> Anyone else hit this?
>
> Thanks,
> Mike
>
> ---
> mpkirby@...
>
>
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