Here are some quick notes from Sheffield. They are a bit hurried….

Saturday Morning – 18 June 2005
Rick Migridge – Expressing Business Rules in Fit

This tutorial was the primary reason that I came to the conference this early – I’ve been particuarly interested in “Automated Acceptance testing” recently. This is the first time that I’ve encountered the term “Storytests”: I like that it; it doesn’t overload “traditional” softare terminology.

A few months ago, I saw Storytests as tests for the system interface – functional or user tests. Recently I have seen the value of using them to express business rules and plugging them into appropriate parts of the domain. Rick’s tutorial has helped consolidate this view of the tests as primarily means of documenting user stories. I find the idea of executable documentation attractive, and early results seem to indicate that it is an easy concept to sell.

Other actions from this are:

• I am going to start trying to use Rick’s FitLibary – the Fixtures seem much more expressive than the older Fit Fixtures.
• I am going to bump Rick and Ward Cunningham’s FIT book way up my (prioritised) reading list.

Like Unit Tests, the Storytests need to be refactored; this is different to the idea of acceptance tests for done stories simply sitting there unaltered and preventing regression.

Saturday Afternoon
Charlie Poole – Test Driven User Interfaces
I was not really sure whether I should attend this tutorial, particularly as it is focussed mostly at Fat clients – something I haven’t worked on for a long time. I learnt a lot of stuff, which makes it worthwhile.

Charlie’s main point was that what makes UIs hard to test is what makes other code hard to test – poor separation of concern. I possible when testing UIs, fake the model and test widgets separately – compose related controls into widgets to test separately.

It made me wonder whether I should rethink writing my own taglibs for JSP, development. Separting the model from web apps is possibly too much hard work, unless I brough Cactus back into the mix – a cactus \ Fit \ JWebunit hybrid- now there’s a thought.

In case you were wondering, the aesthetic aspects of UI can not be automatically tested (lining up of buttons, etc…).