Executable Specifications with Concordion

Nigel Charman presented an overview of Executable Specifications and discussed test architectures. He demonstrated Executable Specifications using the Concordion framework with Fest and SoapUI drivers to test a Java Swing GUI/webservice project.

Concordion also available for .NET, Ruby and Jython

Pros and cons of Concordion approach:

* Pros - elegant UI, well documented, easy to learn, JUnit runner integrates with existing IDE/CI solutions, can use tables or plain text (including given/when/then)
* Cons - lack of tooling (HTML editor, test management), 1 JUnit class required per HTML page

Discussion on "how to build trust with framework"

* can take time,
* testers can manually duplicate the tests until they gain a sufficient level of comfort with the framework, 
* easier to build trust for end-to-end frameworks - users can see GUI tests running, is testing full system functionality