Leandro Moreira

What is Fitnesse?

• It’s a software development collaboration tool.
• It’s a software testing tool.
• It’s a wiki.
• It’s a web server.

This tool provides a way for the BA’s and/or customers write their acceptance testing on wikis and better than this, they can run theirs tests and see if it fails or pass right on the page. Install Fitnesse it’s very simple, you just download and execute. The fitnesse architecture provides two types of test system: slim and the well-known fit. For this tutorial I’ll use the slim.

The hands-on

Scenario: Given that I have the input1 and input2 Then the output Should Be input1 plus space input2. So let’s express the acceptance testing of this feature (or behavior if you want). In Fitnesse we can express this using the decision table, others examples of places to write tests are query table, script table, library table and etc.

|it should print guaqmire|
|input1|input2|output?|
|you|are|you are|
|family|guy|family guy|
|tests|enough|tests enough|

Explaining the table, the first line is the name of the fixture, the second line contains the inputs and outputs names and from the third line on it’s filled with testing data. The output table should look like this:
Let’s setup the wiki-page to it became runnable, edit the page and put these parameters on the page.

!define TEST_SYSTEM {slim}
!define TEST_RUNNER {C:\fit\slim\rubyslim\lib\run_ruby_slim.rb}
!define PATH_SEPARATOR { -I }
!define COMMAND_PATTERN {ruby -I %p %m}
!path C:\fit\slim\rubyslim\lib\
!path C:\fit\ruby\prj\

The first line is setting TEST_SYSTEM to configure fitnesse to use the slim protocol instead of default fit. As we will use slim and ruby, we’ll use the rubyslim library. The second line is setting the TEST_RUNNER to use the ruby slim. Third line defines the PATH_SEPARATOR, used by the COMMAND_PATTERN to separate paths. The fourth line is configuring the COMMAND_PATTERN that will execute the test itself, the two parameters %p (receives all the paths from the page and its ancestors) and %m (the fixture itself) are used to correctly perform the test. The lines with path just informs to fitnesse where it can found the libraries and the runtime files.

And now you can run, is it fails? Good, now let’s programming it in ruby, if you are a newbie ruby as me, your code might be something like this.

module Fixtures
  class ItShouldPrintGuaqmire
   def set_input1 input1
    @input1 = input1
   end
   def set_input2 input2
    @input2 = input2
   end
   def output
    "#{@input1} #{@input2}"
   end
  end
end

Ohh it continues to fail, shame on me. As you can see at the code, I put the fixture inside a module called Fixture, so we need to inform the fitness what module/package is my fixture and we can do that by a table.

|Import|
|Fixtures|

This special table only  configures where is the fixtures. Now let’s see the entire code for fitnesse wiki.

!define TEST_SYSTEM {slim}
!define TEST_RUNNER {C:\fit\slim\rubyslim\lib\run_ruby_slim.rb}
!define PATH_SEPARATOR { -I }
!define COMMAND_PATTERN {ruby -I %p %m}
!path C:\fit\slim\rubyslim\lib\
!path C:\fit\ruby\prj\

|Import|
|Fixtures|

|it should print guaqmire|
|input1|input2|output?|
|you|are|you are|
|family|guy|family guy|
|tests|enough|tests enough|

Running the tests should show

Bonus round – Fitnesse using slim protocol in Java

In fact to make it runnable in Java it’s easier, you don’t need any TEST_RUNNER or COMMAND_PATTERN in your wiki page, since Java it’s default for fitnesse and your final wiki should look like this:

!define TEST_SYSTEM {slim}
!path C:\fit\java\prj\fit-slim-java.jar

|Import|
|br.com.leandromoreira.fixtures|

|it should print guaqmire|
|input1|input2|output?|
|you|are|you are|
|family|guy|family guy|
|tests|enough|tests enough|

And your Java code can be something like this:

package br.com.leandromoreira.fixtures;

public class ItShouldPrintGuaqmire{
  private String input1;
  private String input2;
  public void setInput1(final String i1){
   input1 = i1;
  }
  public void setInput2(final String i2){
   input2 = i2;
  }
  public String output(){
   return input1 + " " + input2;
  }
}

Real world

Usually the real world projects requires a lots of libraries on path, setup pages and more than just decision table to write tests. For instance, you can see that use fitnesse with slim seems more portable , less coupled with runtime and easier to implement too. In the real world you also create wiki for the project and suite test page for stories and organize all your imports and configs on project level, when you are composing a wiki on fitnesse you can take advantage of the fact that all the pages extend the configs from theirs ancestors, so you can have a better project wiki and managable test suite pages.

Update – Issues with Ruby 1.9.x

If you are trying to use the ruby 1.9.x you will have some issues the first one is: require ‘jcode’ issue, I tried to solve it but then it started to show another error ‘list_deserializer.rb:1:in `<’: comparison of String with Float failed (ArgumentError)’.  Since I’m not (still) a ruby guy I don’t know how to fix it.