Wes Maldonado: Data Junkie

I had the chance to meet James Shore at Agile Open Northwest 2007 and have to recommend that you attend the Seattle Scrum Users Group to see him present Agile Requirements with FIT.

If you’re new to FIT, click here to see some of my other posts on FIT. Looking for an agile coach/scrum master in Seattle? Get in touch with me

Topic: Agile Requirements With Fit

Agile projects are all about communication and collaboration. What does that mean for requirements? There’s no up-front requirements phase… does that mean there’s no requirements document or tool? What about functional testing?

Join James Shore for an exploration of requirements on agile projects. James will share what he’s learned about agile requirements in eight years of working with agile team, then introduce Fit, the confusingly-named Framework for Integrated Test. Learn why Fit isn’t what everyone thinks it is, what it has to do with agile requirements, and how you can use Fit to improve communication on your project. This will be an interactive session, so bring your product owner hat and join in!

Seattle Scrum Users Group: Agile Requirements With Fit

You probably need an agile coach, so get in touch with me!

People keep asking me how to start writing Selenium tests. I’m going to give all my secrets away in this easy 3 step plan.

1. Begin by recording your high level test with Selenium IDE, convert the result into the language of your choice and put the code in a unit test.

2. Walk through the generated code and extract “page” into an object, use these to develop a Logical Functional Model of your application.

3. Consider decomposing page elements into objects to make the test code more clear.

Yes, it’s that easy… just give it a try and leave comments if you have questions. And of course, I have to provide the obligatory link to other Selenium related posts I’ve written.

On the Yahoo Fitnesse list Lars Norden asked, “how to stop or abort test is condition fails.” If you can use FitLibrary’s DoFixture in flow mode you can do this easily using the special action abandon storytest. This only works if you are “in flow”:

To be in “flow”, the first table must be a DoFixture (or SequenceFixture). The actions in all following tables are carried out with that fixture. However, as we saw before, an action may provide a different fixture, such as a RowFixture, which will be used with the rest of the table. http://fitlibrary.sourceforge.net/DoFixture/DoFixtureSummary.html

You can also enforce this behavior at the code level by calling setStopOnError(true) in your fixture code.

I found Is Fitnesse Ready for Enterprise? by Naresh Jian today and was impressed to see that he’s rounded up answers for the most common complaints from those new to Fitnesse. I’m going to throw my feedback into this loop and hope to see the community respond. So what is Fitnesse missing? Infrastructure.

Critical infrastructure is a term used by governments to describe material assets that are essential for the functioning of a society and economy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_infrastructure

Critical infrastructure are those things listed by Jeff Atwood in What is “Modern Software Development”?. How does the modern software team using Fit/Fitnesse respond to the “highly irresponsible, sloppy test to rate the quality of a software team” known as the Joel Test?

1. Do you use source control?

Yes, but Fitnesse. . .

1. Can you make a build in one step?

Yes, but Fitnesse. . .

1. Do you make daily builds?

Yes, but Fitnesse. . .

1. Do you have a bug database?

Yes, but Fitnesse. . .

1. Do you fix bugs before writing new code?

Yes, but Fitnesse. . .

1. Do you have an up-to-date schedule?

Yes, just let me wait for this Fitnesse test to finish executing

1. Do you have a spec?

Yes, Fitnesse!

1. Do programmers have quiet working conditions?

Yes, when classpaths in Fitnesse aren’t breaking.

1. Do you use the best tools money can buy?

Yes, but you can’t buy Fitnesse!

1. Do you have testers?

Everyone is a tester with Fitnesse!

1. Do new candidates write code during their interview?

HR said we can’t ask our candidates about their Fitnesse har, punny. :(

1. Do you do hallway usability testing?

What does usability have to do with Fitnesse?

So, now what?

Let’s follow Narish’s example and start building it, want to verify performance requirements Narish’s Fit Decorator might do what you need. Continuous integration problems? Go read Integrating Fit with CruiseControl. Trying to really test EJB’s? Running Fitnesse Inside the Container might just be the ticket!

Jeremy D. Miller wrote two excellent posts that take you step-by-step through the creation of an acceptance test suite using Fitnesse, Selenium and Fitlibrary.

• Create a Testing DSL with FitNesse and Selenium (Part 1)

• Create a Testing DSL with FitNesse and Selenium (Part 2)

In the two posts you’ll see how these pieces were combined to test. . .

. . . a new messaging workflow between our company and a partner company for something that we call a “Bundle.” All told, the entire Bundle pipeline includes:

• A web application on our side to start the Bundle workflow and approve or reject work from our partner

• An extension to our messaging broker component that runs as a polling windows service

• A web service, that we’re building, installed on server at our partner’s that will receive notifications of a new Bundle for them to process

• A web service on our side that will receive a pair of notifications from the partner, including the finished product. This web service enforces a wide range of business rules