One of the early things on a project to get sorted is who is going to be performing acceptance tests and how are they going to be written and executed? Just so we’re clear, acceptance tests are what the customer executes to verify what you (the team) have delivered is what they (the customer) asked for? If not, its back to the old drawing board.

FIT is a Framework for Integrated Tests that was created by Ward Cunningham and is gaining popularity. FIT simply consumes test tables, where a test table is a bunch of acceptance tests with input values and expected results. The trick is to provide test tables in tools that customers use as part of the every day life, and what is more everyday than Word and/or the Web.

Focusing on the Web side of things, FitNesse is a software testing tool that front ends FIT with a wiki. In Fitnesse the customer can write acceptance tests as simple tables that can be executed. These executable test tables call the software that you wish to be accepted by the customer.

Installing Fitnesse

Hmmm. This wasn’t so hard, simply do the following:

  • Download the latest zip and unpack into a directory of your choice.

At the time of writing, the latest zip was fitnesse20060719.zip. Note that FitNesse is a wiki implemented in java. However, it does support the running of acceptance tests for .NET. Now once unpacked, step into the root directory and issue the following:

  • run -p 8888

This will display a little text to say all is well. Now traverse to the FitNesse wiki at:

Here are a couple of quick links you should try:

The last one is very interesting because in the left hand menu, you’ll see the top menu item is Suite. Click this to run all the .NET acceptance tests. Note, that you need .NET installed on your Windows machine.

I’m tired. Tomorrow I’ll step through the problems I had trying to get my own acceptance tests running against inside Fitnesse.