Our industry has matured significantly in terms of responsibility and increased awareness for the internal and external quality of the systems we build. We've seen the rise of automated tests as an essential development tool and practices such as test-driven development. Not to mention xUnit and associated frameworks effectively forming de facto standards for developer testing.

The field of system-wide, functional testing is not quite so far standardized, however. We've invented many names for it--customer test, acceptance test, system test--but we're missing the level of shared understanding of what it really means and how it's really done. Part of this is due to the vast differences in the systems we build and to the technologies involved. Part of it is due to the differences in the software development methods we use.

In this presentation, we'll look at several differing approaches to getting our systems under test and explore the impact they have on our daily lives as software professionals working in an agile environment.