Markus, I love your example. Thanks for the link to your post. It’s great how you can provide such quick feedback even if your environment is “not-Agile”. That’s what agile testing is all about!

What I have observed on a unhealthy project is that each additional example required code changes (for test code and production code). Each additional story took longer to implement. The warning signs were there, but the business team stressed how important it was to make the date so developers decided to ‘refactor it later’. Now, the project is drowning in technical debt because the code that makes the examples pass was not simplified. Some developers are now saying “if we would have done more upfront design we wouldn’t have these problems”. This upsets me because they see it as a failure of agile, but the real reason for the failure is because they did not keep the code clean enough to make it easy to change.

We managed to make good progress with it. Previously the testers were associated with “long feedback”, “irrelevant corner-case issues” etc. During the last summer I realized that this picture changed. Our development lead came to my office asking for input on the current behaviour of our system under test. We have a huge service dealing with the distribution of money around some accounts, that seemed to be broken and he wanted to write an email to our customer on how the system should be have. He had prepared seven examples, he wanted us to exercise. With our previous scripts this would have taken about 2 weeks or so to prepare and execute. With our FIT tests I was able to give him the seven answers in 10 minutes, where the most time I had to take in order to write down the actual behaviour of the system. While doing so I also included the tests into our regression suite, since I found them worthwhile to have when we got an answer from the customer.

I described the same story on Matt Heusser’s blog for becoming a First class citizien as a tester: http://xndev.blogspot.com/2009/03/how-to-be-first-class-citizen-as-tester.html