Concordian, the active specification and acceptance testing
An interesting project called Concordion was brought to my attention via the Domain Driven Design mailing list. The site states:
Concordion is an open source framework for Java that lets you turn a plain English description of a requirement into an automated test.
It is a Java based alternative to Fit/Fitnesse, an acceptance testing tool. The apparent goal of both Fitness and Concordion is to use a lowest common denominator technology to capture a specification for acceptance tests. Fit uses Wiki markup and tables to describe the acceptance tests which David Peterson, the author of Concordion, describes as scripts as opposed to a specification which Concordion ostensibly supports. I have looked at in the past and passed over due to it’s peculiar Wiki-ness. The foundation of Concordion is enhanced HTML markup which describes the acceptance test using the what is expected to be, or at least to evolve into, a Domain Specific Language to describe the specification.
One reason I think this is a sound approach has to do with my experience that Ubiquitous Language and Domain Specific Languages address a common failure pattern in software development projects. Being a self-taught software developer, my career started out in a very procedural context but as I became more aware of Object Oriented Design and Programming, I came to understand that an OOD, and now a Domain Driven Design, approach held the most promise for a shared understanding of the specification as well as expressing the understanding in the technical aspects of a software system. This was important to me because I saw a risk in the traditional approaches to development and have seen the risk manifest in a number of ways.
Anyway, I believe that this project is one to keep your eye on. I will spend some time with it and post up my experiences using it.
