Share via

Mugridge on Fit

  • Article

How could I pass up the opportunity to hear Rick Mugridge talk about Expressing Business Rules in Fit?

Um…  What is Fit?  And, who is Rick Mugridge?

Fit is an open-source framework for the automation of acceptance tests.  And, Rick is a leading contributor to the Fit ecosystem.  He’s also an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Auckland and the co-author of Fit for Developing Software: Framework for Integrated Tests with Ward Cunningham.

I have not yet used Fit on a project.  But, it is still on the top of my list of really cool things.  Basically, you use Fit to capture software requirements as “story tests” in tables in Word documents.  This allows you to document a conversation between the customer team and the development team.  But, it also allows you to automate these tests and produce HTML output with red/green status indicators.  The idea is to make the acceptance tests so easy to write that even the customer can do it.

That’s all well and good, but how do you automate a bunch of tables in a Word document?  That’s where you (a developer or tester) come in: you write something called a fixture, which is really just an adapter between Fit and the object you want to test.  The idea here is to get beneath the presentation layer and test the model directly.

I’d give you an example, but like I said, I haven’t used it yet.  Check out the Fit site for more information.  Odds are, there’s a port for your favorite language.

Comments