Automated Acceptance Testing as an Agile Requirements Engineering Practice

This article describes how the use of automated acceptance test-driven development (ATDD) impacts requirements engineering in software development. We extend an existing framework of inherent risks in RE by adding knowledge from literature and a case study. We show how ATDD can be seen as a mix of the traditional RE focus on documentation and the agile focus on iterative communication. ATDD can mitigate some of the inherent risks in RE. It also carries with it the need for a proper domain and a very rigorous development method that requires disciplined developers and dedicated customers, preferably on-site.