If life were a game...

I haven't been completely idle. Appart from my rambings on twitter and google+ I've also been making regular posts to a new facebook group on Agile Software Development . I will return to talk about RestScriptFixture, fun with NodeJS and are games (like movies) out of new ideas?

So most of the tests I'm writing now in Fitnesse are using RestFixture . Being able to do all this black box style testing has helped me get a lot of tests up and running without having to change the existing code base. Now I've taken a step future with my own little fork  so I can use scenarios and build nice BDD style scripts. But first I want to give me own quick guide to using RestFixture Step 1: Installing You can dive straight in by grabbing the latest jar files for RestFixture here  https://github.com/smartrics/RestFixture/downloads If you know what you're doing can get the nodep version to work nicely along side other libraries you may be including in Fitnesse. But I grabbed the 'full' version and unzipped it into a RestFixture folder alongside my FitNesseRoot folder. Step 2: Write your first test I took advantage of the built in Fitnesse api as a basic test and wrote a page called RestFixture with the following contents !define TEST_SYSTEM {slim} !...

I created this class so I can run basic database commands from within Fitnesse. Dropping SQL into a Fitnesse page not recommended but it can still be a useful tool for a few reasons: It is reusable so you can drop it into lots of tests without making new classes all the time It's a good bridging tool in trying to get developers using fitnesse who are not used to creating an abstraction layer for their tests It's handy to combine with RestFixture when you need to adjust or validate the data but cannot do it through a rest command But again it's not recommended. Better to create a new fixture with a function like public void createNewUser(String name, String password) Here is what running the JDBCFixture looks like in the fitnesse !path lib/*.jar !|import | |com.warmage.util.fixtures| !|script|DBQueryFixture|mydatabase |user |pass | |check |statement |UPDATE users SET city='New York...

I was thinking of writing a short bit on writing tests in Fitnesse . But instead I'm going to recommend the tutorials by Brett L. Schuchert http://schuchert.wikispaces.com/FitNesse.Tutorials as they skip straight into using SLIM. The guides on fitnesse.org (and with the install) are good but explain everything with FIT first before racing though what is different with SLIM. That's just the nature of how Fitnesse was developed but it's worth skipping straight to SLIM as it has less requirements and can be more flexable.

Some pretty basic steps but just to make sure it's here for everyone to see. Setting up fitnesse and running the jar is easy enough. Just go to http://fitnesse.org/ and get started and do it on your desktop just to see it in action. But for me that wasn't good enough I wanted it to run as service on ubuntu. I stole a few tricks from how ubuntu runs jenkins and setup fitnesse a similar way. 1. Create a user and group for fitnesse (optional) I didn't do this because I wanted tomcat, jenkins and fitnesse all running as the same user. Call it laziness to avoid any permissions classing but it doesn't change the process that you need to create or choose what user you're going to make it run as. Don't make it run as your user or root! 2. Download the jar file and place it in /usr/share/fitnesse Make the folder too of course. It can belong to root as long as the fitnesse user has read access 3. Create the folder to run in at /var/lib/fitnesse Fitnesse user needs...

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...

Have you seen a build flag that states "no tests". What's the point building code without running all your tests? What's the harm in running them one last time? Tests are there to be run. A LOT! Settings that allow you to run tests every time you save a file in your IDE help ensure your unit tests are fast and passing all the time. Unit tests are there to catch you when you break something unexpected. You may think your fixing a bug with a date-time object but maybe that fix breaks something else down the line. The tests are there to tell you. If you never run your tests then why bother having them? Why not just delete them all? When should tests be run? As often as possible. Especially fast unit tests Every time you build Before committing changes to production code to version control Before  committing changes to test code to version control After committing code to version control (via Continuous Integration)