At TechnoPhobia, we have an interesting challenge to implement a technology agnostic requirements capture process that (in my mind) will enable us, with very minimal effort, to repurpose these documented requirements into fully automated browser tests. I’m thinking that the process could look something like this:

1. The project and client team write end-user functional requirements as User Stories and Scenarios
2. The stories are stored as plain text in SVN or GIT and made immediately available to the development and test teams
3. The development and test teams create a few executable padder files, wrapped around these stories, turning them into fully automatable browser tests
4. The executable files are run, they read the stories and interact with the browser to determine if the stories successfully pass

Pretty cool, huh! No more massive team specific documents, just good old plain textual stories that are shared by all on the project, including the client.

Making this happen across multiple technologies

• In Ruby, we’ve already used this parts of this approach on a live project using Cucumber (formally RSpec story runner). It worked pretty well. 
• In Java, easyb seems to be the a good forward. Here’s a little more about using easyb

I am WAY TOO EXCITED to see an implementation in Java! This opens massive opportunity to progress with a technology agnostic approach. Now to find a suitable solution for .Net and perhaps PHP