Acceptance test-driven development
Acceptance test-driven development (ATDD) is a practice where the whole team, business, development, and testing, agrees on concrete acceptance tests for a feature before building it. Those tests are written from the user’s point of view, they define what “done” means, and they are automated so the feature can be checked against them. Where TDD asks “am I building it right?”, ATDD asks “am I building the right thing?”
The agreement usually happens in a short conversation among the “three amigos”: someone representing the business (often the Product Owner), a developer, and a tester, who turn a User story into concrete examples.
Also known as
ATDD · acceptance-test-driven development · story testing · (closely related) specification by example
Don't confuse with
- TDD: TDD is developer-level and unit-focused; ATDD is feature-level and whole-team. They are complementary, not rivals: ATDD frames the feature, TDD builds each piece.
- BDD: heavy overlap. BDD is essentially ATDD done with a deliberate shared, plain-language style (Given/When/Then). Many teams use the terms interchangeably; the practical difference is emphasis, not kind.
How it fits the requirements you’ve read
ATDD turns a User story’s acceptance criteria into executable tests. The criteria stop being prose that people argue about later and become concrete, agreed examples checked automatically. That tightens the link between the requirements and what actually gets verified.
In plain English
Before building a feature, agree on the exact examples that will prove it works, then build until those examples pass.
See also
- User story and its acceptance criteria: what ATDD makes executable
- Behavior-driven development: the plain-language flavor of the same idea
- Test-driven development: the developer-level counterpart
References
- M. Gärtner, ATDD by Example: A Practical Guide to Acceptance Test-Driven Development (Addison-Wesley, 2012). https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/atdd-by-example/9780321784155/
- G. Adzic, Specification by Example (Manning, 2011). https://www.manning.com/books/specification-by-example