Currently there’s a discussion going around the Blogosphere and Twitterverse about whether or not driving development with acceptance tests--particularly automated acceptance tests--is a good thing. Many expert practitioners have weighed in, including Gojko Adzic, George Dinwiddie, Ron Jeffries, and James Shore.

I find value in each perspective, and I know what works for my team, because we’ve been experimenting with different approaches for developing software for more than six years. If your team hasn’t already figured out how to make sure you develop the code the customers want--at the quality level they need, in a timely manner, and all that good stuff--how do you make sense of all these different techniques? Most importantly, if you aren’t enjoying your work now, how can you find more reward in what you do?

It’s really important to me to be a nice person. I like to be nice to people. I help out, I smile, I answer questions without making people feel stupid, and I bring treats to work. I thank teammates when they’re nice to me.

I’ve been lucky to be on software development teams where people do nice things for each other. Today, I was struggling to get a Watir test script running. Three times in about 20 minutes, I asked a coworker to come look at something I couldn’t figure out. Each time, as soon as he was standing there, I realized what my problem was. He was nice about it. He didn’t make me feel stupid or as if I had wasted his time.

As I’ve had more opportunities to get out into the world and meet people on other teams and in other companies, I’ve learned that on some teams, people aren’t so nice.

Some leaders in the testing industry continue to maintain that test teams are “gatekeepers”, the watchguards for quality. This makes me sad. I’ve spent many years now in development organizations where everyone--programmers, architects, DBAs, system administrators, analysts, customers as well as testers--takes responsibility for quality. These teams have delivered software whose quality is many levels of magnitude beyond teams where the testers were the quality gatekeepers.

CITCON North America 2009 was held last weekend in Minneapolis. I'm on the organizing committee, but was unable to attend this year due to a conflict. I was bummed, because I found the one last year to be one of the most valuable conferences I've ever attended.

The biggest feedback received at the conference is that the participants wished there had been more testers, or at least, more "tester-programmers." Most attendees were programmers or "programmer-testers," so there weren't as many testing-oriented sessions--especially business-facing-type testing.