I am trying to find a way to make the projects I work on more transparent to the business size, even though backend programming is not quite visible all the time. So in order to this I want to try ATDD and building acceptance tests with Cucumber. Is there a friendly way to show these tests to the business - I still think that running them from the command line is as cryptic as things were until now ? I am thinking of a web interface or something like that.
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What I typically do is create the acceptance tests along with the business side (whoever actually does the acceptance testing is the Product Owner). I try to use whatever tool they're comfortable with for this, so it can be anywhere from sticky notes on the wall, to google docs, to integrated with our AgileZen or Pivotal Tracker. The point here is to make them feel comfortable with the process, rather than overwhelmed with the tools.
For doing the acceptance testing, having cucumber internally is great, but the product owner should be able to click through a demo/staging site and follow the story. You'll have a high confidence that it will be accepted if you've written the cuke tests correctly.
To give visibility into the cuke test results, however, we use continuous integration (jenkins), where part of the output is the cucumber tests. You can play around with formatting and output files to make this a test artifact that's nicely colored and formatted. Then, include the product owner on the build emails, so they can see for themselves exactly what's passing. Or, email them copies of the output (automate it or do it manually, whatever's easier) if they want the results delivered directly to them.
