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Fitnesse

Anyone who has worked with me in the last 3 years knows I have a programmer crush on Uncle Bob and I got most of my initial training on Agile development from James Grenning. So it was just a matter of time until I started using Fitnesse. Now fitnesse (and fit originally) is an interesting tool to try and get acceptance tests OUT of code. After all why should programmers (or programmer-ish testers) be the only ones to write, read and review these tests? Acceptance testing is about making sure you deliver what the customer wanted so shouldn't the customer and other management people be reading them too? So fitnesse meets them in a middle ground. A wiki.

A wiki is a good place to go because you can get a manager or customer to read a wiki. You can, with a bit of a push, even get them to start contributing to a wiki. Good luck trying to get them using jmeter or read what you created in cucumber! Those are great tools but they don't scratch the itch that fitnesse was written for.

So I've been writing fixtures and playing around with scenarios and scripts. But what has me really excited is combining all that with RestFixture. I'm currently dealing with a lot of java code with all the front end piped through a RESTful service. It's a pretty common way to develop any distributed service these days and works pretty well. So I've been able to build up detailed tests that push all kinds of scenarios through the rest api without touching any UI code. And I've been able to condense it down to user stories that read like English so I can get the business analysts types to read and review them. With a bit of training I might even get them writing the first drafts of new areas to test.

But it hasn't been without challenges. So I want to document exactly what I've done and the kind of tests I'm able to now write. More post will come later but first I need to clean up my fork of RestFixture so I can get my changes accepted back into the original!
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