Since Feb’s Agile Scotland talk on automated acceptance testing, I’ve been been getting more and more into Fitnesse; fair enough, since the talk was by Brian Swan, I really ought to be knee deep in Exactor.

There’s little more natural for most test documentation than a table: input column and expected output columns. Make those tables executable (Fit), then the the easy wiki interface of Fitnesse and you may have a winner: it even looks great.

So far I’ve written acceptance tests for the XP Wednesday Web Expenses, using Fitnesse with the JWebunit fixtures and applied them first against a Java Servlet based implementation then a Ruby On Rails version; I loved having the acceptance tests for the second implementation (they postdated the first).

I’ve also been working on extending these Jdbc Fitnesse fixtures to use for database unit testing. Ok, Fitnesse is meant to be an acceptance rather than unit testing framework, but I need them to be writable by Database programmers with no Java, or desire to learn Java.

Drawbacks with Fitnesse:

• I can’t think of a neat way to incorporate the tests into souce control (CVS), such that the tests are associated with a version of code.

• The documentation ain’t that good. As good and concise as the source code is, I’ve been finding the style not to my taste and hence a bit tricky to follow- recursion for iteration is something I try to avoid since first reading McConnell.