Agile Australia 2009 is close and the deadline for talk proposals ends next week. I’ve submitted one talk proposal:

Where do Acceptance Tests go to die?
Often the first thing a mature agile developer does when picking up a new card from the story wall is to create an automated test to validate its acceptance criteria. After some iterations the build time gets really long due to tons of tests running to validate those. Are we writing the right tests? How much time are we spending in maintaining the test suite? How much of the feedback cycle is spent in running slow test drivers?
In this talk we are going to think about the user story lifecycle and how its acceptance criteria should be tested. I am going to present options for acceptance testing that focus on creating a suite that that is flexible enough to endure a world in continuous change.
Phillip Calçado is a Lead Consultant for ThoughtWorks. He acts as a technical leader and architect specialised in highly scalable Internet applications and digital media.

It is based on my blog posts about acceptance testing and user story lifecycle.

Let’s see what the board thinks of it…