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10/10/2004: "UGOT: A familiar approach to testing from Frank Cohen"

Recently JavaRanch promoted Frank Cohen's latest book, Java Testing and Design. Given the title, naturally I was interested in seeing someone's viewpoint on how testing affects design. Frank described UGOT -- User Goal-Oriented Testing -- which sounds awfully familiar.

UGOT is a testing methodology that models the behavior of archetypal users of a service. In the book I show how to understand these behaviors and how to turn them into test agent code. The resulting code does a functional test of a service.

This sounded to me like Customer Testing, so I asked Frank about that, and he admitted having little knowledge of Agile testing techniques. His response confirmed what I suspected, that UGOT is essentially Customer Testing with explicit use of the Personas technique of User-Centered Design. I find it encouraging when different communities, working separately, come up with strikingly similar ideas.

Follow the discussion here.