XePtance: Supporting Distributed Acceptance Tests in Extreme Programming Projects

Acceptance tests are of major importance for the successful roll-out of new software products. Any brilliantly engineered software unable to suit the user’s expectations will fail in practice. Tight time-to-market and limited resources makes acceptance testing difficult. This is especially true if multiple locations for development and testing are concerned. We argue that a solution must allow an off-site customer to test the software in question whenever he finds the time to do so. This requires tool support as well as simplicity in design. Within these constraints, we propose on a framework and elaborate on a prototypical software solution that facilitates distributed acceptance testing in Extreme Programming projects. We utilize technologies to allow the deployment over the internet even in strictly organized company networks. We provide further evidence of the feasibility by deploying the software prototype to evaluate the design.