Test Driven Development of Web Applications: A Lightweight Approach

The difficulty of creating a test suite before developing a web application is the main barrier to the adoption of the Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD) paradigm. In this work, we present a general lightweight approach and a specific instantiation based on existing tools for acceptance test driven development of web applications. The idea, which is the basis of our approach, is simple: using a capture/replay tool able to generate test scripts on previously created Screen Mockups of the web application to develop. These test scripts can be later executed against the web application, and used to drive its development following the requirements in ATDD mode. The presented approach has been used to re-develop the main features of an open-source web application. Observations, limitations of the approach, and lessons learnt are outlined.