Programmers Control Acceptance Tests

You want to adopt comphrensive acceptance testing, but nobody wants to take responsibility for ATs.

Therefore,

Put the programmers in charge of writing their own acceptance tests, and if (when) people start to complain, transfer the responsibility to them.

But,

The idea is to gently shift the responsibility onto the customer, where it belongs.

Evidence/Examples

From the XpMailingList [message http://groups.yahoo.com/group/extremeprogramming/message/21120]:

A tactic that sometimes works is to have programmers take control of deciding what acceptance tests are and write them. If management doesn't like this, or the software doesn't do what customers expect, you can gently nudge that responsibility to them, where it belonged in the first place.

Discussion:

Only have one source for this ProtoPattern so far. Anyone else ever see/hear of this working?

I have been writing ATs myself, in "XP for one" mode, for 5+ months. No results yet, but I hope for "success" as per this pattern. -- LaurentBossavit

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AdoptingXpPatternLanguage

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CategoryPattern | CategoryExtremeProgramming