Eric Lefevre-Ardant on Java & Agile

Influential members of the Agile community recently discussed the current state and history of Fit (the original thing, not Fitnesse or other Fit-inspired tools). The conversation took place on Twitter mostly on Tuesday, March 3rd and Wednesday, March 4th. Here is a transcript.

It was kicked off by an interview of Ward Cunningham and James Shore on Hanselminutes where Ward & James were asked whether Fit was dead.

Bob Martin first reacted on Twitter by pointing out that, at any rate, “FitNesse is thriving”, along with Slim, a new system that can be used by Fitnesse as an engine to run the test tables.

Michael Feathers replied that, in his view, Fit was more appropriate as a seed for other works: “Take it, grow it locally, and never commit back.” This seems confirmed by James Shore, a former leader of the Fit project (and a successor to Ward in that role): “Fit core was intentionally resistant to change [...] from an organizational perspective”

Interestingly, James believes that both Fit and Fitnesse have “similar flaws, which could be solved by another approach”:

• “Fit flaw #1: maintenance. HTML is hard to maintain and refactor.”
• “Fit flaw #2: Customers. Customers don’t generate the documents, and that was the whole idea.”
• “Fit flaw #3: Programmers. Fit loves domain models and Whole Value. Most programmers don’t. Impedance mismatch.”

This last point is actually seen as a benefit by J.B. Rainberger: “Similar to JUnit, Fit puts positive pressure on programmers. [That said] TDD informs design, but many use JUnit for testing. Fit informs feature design, but many use Fit for testing.” James agrees: “Fit drives the design of the domain layer just as TDD drives separation of concerns.”

JB & James both note that, regardless of the tool itself, they “continue to succeed collaborating with customers with Fit’s table format”, typically by “collaborating with examples on a whiteboard”.

Possibly, the biggest shortcoming (as stated by James & Ward during the interview, but also in twitter by Brian Marick: “I can’t offhand think of any product owner who wrote tests in any format”) is that the assumption that business people would write the tables was flawed. A view not shared by Keith Braithwaite “I’ve had actual users write tests in tables in excel with success”. JB, for one, prefers “Customers help write docs”, reformulated by Elisabeth Hendrickson as “Business stakeholders & implementation team collaborate on articulating expectations.”

Finally, several people including Willem van den Ende pointed to BDD and especially to Cucumber as a better implementation of the same ideas “Cucumber given/when/then steps flow naturally for me, FIT- style tables are optional, I add them later if needed.”

For more details see the following links:

• Details by James Shore on how to use Fit (or not)
• Michael Feathers’ opinion on the code that makes the Java implementation of Fit
• The interview of Ward Cunningham and James Shore on Hanselminutes

I really like how Fitnesse is doing these days (I even subscribed to the mailing list, which I had not considered last year, for example). Bob Martin is adding features every few weeks. It is great!

In the release he did a couple of days ago, he added 2 interesting things:

• one is a format tool that helps giving a more readable view of your tables, in editing mode; unfortunately, your edit panel must be using a fixed-size font (which it is not the case by default on my system)
• the most interesting addition, though, is the support of SCM tools to store wiki pages

There are two ways to configure a SCM tool.

The first is to specify it on the command line:

  java -DCM_SYSTEM=package.to.AParticularCmSystemIntegrationClass -jar fitnesse.jar

The second is to specify in a high-level page on your hierarchy of pages:

  !define CM_SYSTEM {com.project.fitnesse.OurSvnSystem me/my_password /cm/myRespository}

This one is interesting, because it allows you to have different configurations for different hierarchies of pages (typically one for each different projects, or even for different versions of the same project).

The bad news, though, is that the CM System Integration class in question is not provided by default, though I’m sure that in time there will be all sorts of appropriate integration classes provided with Fitnesse. But that’s not the case so far (except for an example made to connect to Git — not sure how generic it is). That said, it does seem quite easy to implement that class (you basically need to implement calls to the command line in Java).

You might want to download the Fitnesse release and check out the FitNesse.UserGuide.SourceCodeControl page. As often with Fitnesse, the website does not have the latest details.