If you’re a tester that works in an environment where your teams practice test-driven development (TDD), behavior-driven development (BDD), or some other variation that sounds really similar, you’ll quickly be learning that people toss around terms like “story”, “feature”, “acceptance criteria”, and “scenario.” What they often won’t toss around is the context for those terms. That’s context is important to have because it depends entirely on how the terms are used in your environment. While there are not necessarily standards, there are lots of good opinions that have led to good practices in context. Liz Keogh’s Acceptance Criteria vs Scenarios and Matt Wynne’s Features != User Stories are two good examples.

As a tester, what do you have to know? How involved are you in these things? Is all this just for developers? If you’re writing stories, are you also writing tests? Is acceptance criteria the same thing as an acceptance test? Here’s my take on a few of these questions.