An acceptance-test development approach by any other name would smell as sweet

Gaffo forwarded this snippet from the RSpec users list in response to the question "Is there a difference between Behaviour-Driven-Development and Story-Driven-Development?":

Excellent question,

I think the more common term is STDD (Story Test Driven Development). There is ATDD (Acceptance-Test Driven Development too) ;-)

They are all variations on the same theme and only marginally different IMO. The biggest difference seems to be that different people and groups promote them and talk about them in slightly different ways, and emphasise the various techniques differently. My personal take is that BDD *is* ATDD/STDD, but with an additional emphasis on Business value and getting the words right. I'm not sure how ATDD and STDD are different.

Maybe the best place to get a good balance of viewpoints on this topic is in a tool-agnostic forum - maybe this one:
http://groups.google.com/group/behaviordrivendevelopment (I don't know of any STDD or ATDD forums).

There are good articles about ATDD and STDD here:

• http://testobsessed.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/example.pdf
  
• http://industriallogic.com/papers/storytest.pdf
  
• http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/sqe/bettersoftware0908/ (page 24-29)
  

Sounds about right to me. The most important thing is what you actually are doing, not what you call it (though that's important, too). Around here, I use ATDD, since I think it best describes the practice and people are already familiar with what acceptance tests are. And STDD sounds too much like STD, which doesn't exactly foster a mindset of willing acceptance.