Best Practices with FitNesse
Google doesn't seem to show me any best practices that anyone has put together with FitNesse, which is odd (or my Google skills suck) so I thought I would capture a bunch here that I've come up with to start.
- Keep your wiki test pages small
- Having a wiki test page with 20,000 tests doesn't do anyone any good. First off, it'll take days to load. Second, it's a sea of gobbly-gook looking at it in edit mode and next to impossible to find that one line that you need to edit. Do your team a favour and keep them small. Like development practices, I like to keep my FIT pages down to a screen or two at most.
- Organize your tests so they make sense
- FIT supports test suites and they're useful, especially for organzing things. Having one table with hundreds of scenarios might be good (more tests are always good) but if they're difficult to read or navigate they'll be cumbersome to maintain. Use a single responsiblity principle when it comes to organizing your tests and try to group them together into some kind of organizational category or unit that makes sense to the tests and users. For example if you have FIT tests that are testing accounts, consider writing a table for each type of account; a table for account fail conditions; a table for special conditions; etc.
- Use "Friendly Names"
- Rather than seeing complete namespaces and fixture names, use friendly names with spaces. So this:
"|MyCompany.MyApplication.MyFixture|"
can become:
"|My Fixture|"
Also you can use the !import table to remove the fully qualified namespaces. This makes it more appealing to look at when you're showing value to the customer of these tests. - Seed your test pages and engage the authors
- Getting started with FIT and actually having tests can be a big hurdle. To be setup for success, have the entire team not only go through creating the fixtures and tests but work with the authors about what scenarios they can test. For example not everyone thinks about the failure conditions that should be tested (using the fail[] markup) so make sure the authors of the tests know all the different things they can try. The best scenario you can ask is a perfect test author who knows all the things to test, but when adopting FIT you might need to do a FitNesse 101 with them and get them introduced to different ideas around testing, not just entering tables over and over again. Quality not quantity is what you're looking for in the end.
Feel free to add your own!