I Hate FitNesse / Fitnesse Rocks!

I want you to know that i have a love hate relationship with fitnesse.

I have been using it for several months now and sometimes i really hate it; i still use it and advocate its use, but i still hate it. Tim Ottinger summed up using FitNesse really well over on the FitNesse group (yahoo) . He said that Using Fitnesse is not unlike trying to teach a dog to sing. Its not that the dog is a bad singer, its simply a miracle that it can sing at all.

And its true. FitNesse is not a great wiki, but it does do wiki. It doesn't work very well in CI, but it can be integrated into CI. It has its own versioning that isn't great (millions of zip files), but it can be versioned traditionally (using SVN or CVS). It doesn't have any metrics (test execution over time, defects, test coverage), but you can get those through CI or integration with another tool (we are experimenting with integration into Quality Center [sic]).

There is also the big issue of user management. There several authentication methods supported by FitNesse:

1. No authentication (default), anybody can do any thing!
2. UserPassword: Defines one user and its password on fitnesse start: ... -a userA:passworA
3. PasswordFile: For multiple users, read once on fitnesse start, so adding new users requires a restart ffs.
4. LinuxPAM plugin: Use PAM to access Linux user passwords, requires a plugin.
5. Provide your own AuthenticatorClass as plugin.

Given a choice i'd opt for the PasswordFile mode but then administration becomes tiresome.

For more info on user management checkout:

• http://fitnesse.org/FitNesse.StartingAndStoppingFitNesse
• http://fitnesse.org/FitNesse.CommandLineArguments
• http://fitnesse.org/FitNesse.PasswordFile
• http://fitnesse.org/FitNesse.PluginUsage
• http://fitnesse.org/PluginsPage.LinuxPamAuthenticator