Importance of Acceptance Tests

Every sprint we struggled with what carrot/stick could be used to get people to lay out acceptance tests. I pleaded. I begged. I did not force, but maybe should have. Now we have a concrete example of why they are important. We're two weeks before release, and one of the major search features was found to return invalid results. Why now? Well, no one had checked to see if it gave correct results - only if it would crash. And 10 days before ship is the first time a stake holder with knowledge of this feature actually looked at it.

Talk about a process breakdown.