EasyAccept is an open-source Java tool: a script interpreter and runner that supports automatic acceptance test-driven development. Scripts are written in a client-readable form that represents testing at the user story level. The scripting language supports calls to a façade to the software being tested. Therefore, the developer must first create a façade, and then grow the scripting language from a small base of built-in commands to enable testing at the user story level.

The evaluation of EasyAccept presents results from three groups of student projects. In the first group, students were not provided with EasyAccept acceptance tests beforehand, and a retrospective evaluation showed that only 71 percent of user stories were delivered with all acceptance tests passing. The remaining two groups were supplied with EasyAccept acceptance tests beforehand, and their compliance rates were measured at 98 percent and 99 percent, respectively. The authors conclude that EasyAccept is particularly suitable for teaching software development. The evaluation results are only presented at the summary level: it is more typical to provide minimums, maximums, standard deviations, and box-plots to convey experimental results. For example, in the first group, perhaps an individual project did score well. We simply do not know.

The idea of using a façade to enable the writing and execution of client-readable acceptance tests at the user story level is to be commended. If EasyAccept is further developed and integrated into platforms like Eclipse, then this approach to test-driven development would likely become popular. This paper is strongly recommended to anyone working in software engineering.