More on converting a team to XP/TDD ...

Today I had an idea for a hybrid approach to
introducing TDD and XP to the group. Well, it was an
idea to me, perhaps I just reinvented the wheel. 

As I've mentioned before, I've got a group that are
using a traditional software dev methodology (big
requirements gathering, large design, long code cycle,
integration hell, QA till we all fall down). We are
currently gathering metrics on how things are done
today with the current process so we can measure
improvement during TDD/XP. 

QA is typically done when the Dev group throw the code
"over the wall" for testing. Generally, they have to
wait till then anyway since the design document is so
far from reality, only the final code is sufficient to
write test plans against. 

So, what I'm introducing for this next feature we will
be working on, is to have the QA team extract from the
requirements document and translate it into user
stories with the corresponding acceptance tests, in
cooperation with the developers and "customer" (in
this case marketing). This shouldn't be a big impact
on the customer, but rather just a "we want to confirm
this ... " conversation. 

Since the developers are not currently doing TDD, we
can still push towards a test driven approach without
actually writing the unit tests. This should start to
get everyone familiar with the concept of a "deck" of
acceptance tests to code and manually test against. I
believe that way, the transition to XP should be
smoother. 

Hopefully I explained that sufficiently?

Thoughts?
-Sandy


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