There were a couple dozen people who showed up at the Fool, last night, for my presentation on A ”Lingua Franca” to Ensure You Get the Right System.  I’d like to thank them all for coming and for such lively participation.

These are exciting times.  The tools of acceptance testing and behavior-driven development are progressing beyond the domain of the techies.  They are entering the realm where they can help the Whole Team.

Using these tools, or even better ones to come, the Three Amigos, Developer, Tester, and Business (and User Experience expert, and Manual Writer, and …), can invent their own shared language, specific to the system under development, to talk about what the system is supposed to do.  The acid test: that the Business representative feels comfortable reading the examples written in these terms and definitively say, “Yes, that’s what I mean” or not.

After the presentation, Uncle Bob Martin showed me the Given When Then capabilities he’s added to Fitnesse since I last looked at it last fall.  Other tools mentioned included Cucumber, SpecFlow, JBehave, easyb, GivWenZen, Morelia Viridis, StoryQ, and StorEvil.  I’m sure there’s more to come.  And, as we use these tools more and more, I’m sure that we’ll develop patterns beyond Given When Then and language specification tools beyond regular expressions.

Just remember, it’s not the technology that’s important.  It’s the communication between the Three (plus) Amigos.