Presenter First - Approach

Approach

Presenter First concentrates on transforming each of a customer's requirements into a well tested, working feature as quickly and with as much correlation to the customer's story language (requirement) as possible. The language of the story or requirement is used to directly guide development of the feature – even naming the modules and function calls. As a consequence, the feature implementation tends to closely represent the customer's desire with little extraneous or unneeded functionality. The language of the source code also corresponds closely to the customer's stories.

Presenter First is often applied in graphical user interface applications. It is equally well applied to the development of command-line interfaces. Further, a slight variation of the approach has been used effectively in embedded software; here the integral design pattern is known as Model-Conductor-Hardware and the approach is termed Conductor First.

When used in GUI applications, this approach allows the presentation logic and business logic of the application to be developed in a test first manner decoupled from on-screen widgets. Thus, the vast majority of the application programming can be tested via unit tests in an automated test suite. In so doing, the reliance on GUI testing tools to perform extensive system testing can be reduced to verifying basic GUI operation or eliminated entirely.