Monday, May 04, 2009

Notes from Gojko Adzic's "What is FitNesse and Should I Use It?"

Last week, I went to What is FitNesse and Should I Use It? by Gojko Adzic.

I was struck by the difference between two of his slides:

And a slide from a different talk about FitNesse that I'd attended a week earlier:

To be fair, Gojko said that it's very easy to hook lots of different kinds of testing into FitNesse, and he had been as guilty of it as anyone else.

Here are a couple other good things I picked up from Gojko's presentation that I hope to put to use:

  • Focus on "what" and not "how". Don't try to translate test scripts into FitNesse—that's "how" and can lead to having a lot of similar or duplicated setup code. In fact, if you find yourself writing many similar tests, you're probably focusing too much on "how".

  • To keep your tests as living documentation, separate them into to main categories: tests for the current release and tests for previous releases organized by feature. At the end of each release, move the tests from that release into the other category.