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The Finesse of FitNesse


By Allen Holub
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September 15, 2006 —  (Page 1 of 3)
Last time I heard Robert Martin talk, he was waxing poetic about a testing framework called FitNesse (www.fitnesse.org), which I finally got around to checking out this week. FitNesse is an interesting amalgam of a test-suite driver and a wiki. You define your tests as tables, using standard wiki notation (vertical bars to separate columns, for example) embedded into a standard Web page. If you don't speak wiki, you can cut and paste the tables from a spreadsheet. You can also put normal English on the page, so you can easily write about what the test is actually testing, provide links to other tests and so forth. The page also includes a "Test" button, which when clicked, runs the tests and colors various rows in the tables to indicate where the test succeeded or failed.

These tables are front ends for methods in test classes (called “fixtures”) that you write, and different fixtures handle the tables in different ways.

For example, the “ColumnFixture” treats the columns as either inputs or expected outputs of methods in the fixture class (which you write). The first row of the table identifies the actual fixture class to instantiate to run the test, the second row contains either a method name (which represents a desired return value) or argument names. You specify sample arguments in the argument columns, and the expected return value in the column labeled with the test-method name. When you push the Test button, the system calls the method as many times as there are rows, passing it the arguments you specified and checking the expected return value against the actual return value. If they don’t match, the cell is colored red; otherwise it’s green.

(That’s one thing that’s both good and bad about FitNesse. In a test-driven-development environment where you, the programmer, are running test suites manually every few minutes, this sort of visual feedback is great. In a large fully automated test battery that’s running unattended overnight, I’d rather have just a list of failed tests than pages of visual candy.)




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