Resolve To Get FIT

From NeoWiki

Try FIT and JUnit for a requirements testing workout!

Andrew Glover, President, Stelligent Incorporated

28 Feb 2006

Whereas JUnit assumes that every aspect of testing is the domain of developers, the Framework for Integrated Tests (FIT) makes testing a collaboration between the business clients who write requirements and the developers who implement them. Does this mean that FIT and JUnit are competitors? Absolutely not! Code quality perfectionist Andrew Glover shows you how to combine the best of FIT and JUnit for better teamwork and effective end-to-end testing.

In the software development life-cycle, everyone owns quality. Ideally, developers start ensuring quality early in the development cycle with testing tools like Junit and TestNG, and QA teams follow up with functional system tests at the end of the cycle, using tools like Selenium. But even with excellent quality assurance, some applications are deemed low-quality upon delivery. Why? Because they don't do what they were intended to do.

Communication errors between the client or the business department that authors application requirements and the development team that implements them are a frequent cause of friction, and sometimes the cause of downright failure in development projects. Luckily, there are ways to facilitate the communication between requirements authors and implementors early on.

Tip: Download FIT The Framework for Integrated Tests, or FIT, was originally created by Ward Cunningham, who is best known as the inventor of the wiki. Visit Cunningham's Web site to learn more about FIT and download it for free.

A FITting solution

The Framework for Integrated Tests (FIT) is a testing platform that facilitates communication between those who write requirements and those who turn them into executable code. With FIT, requirements are fashioned into tabular models that serve as the data model for tests written by developers. The tables themselves serve as the input and expected output for the tests.

Figure 1 shows a structured model created using FIT. The first row is the test name and the next row's three columns are headers relating to inputs (value1 and value2) and the expected results (trend()).

About the author

Andrew Glover is president of Stelligent Incorporated, a JNetDirect company. Stelligent Incorporated helps companies address software quality with effective developer testing strategies and continuous integration techniques that enable teams to monitor code quality early and often. He is the coauthor of Java Testing Patterns (Wiley, September 2004).

"When you have learned to snatch the error code from the trap frame, it will be time for you to leave.", thus spake the master programmer.