Monday, 6 October 2008

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:
Posted by Stuart Taylor at 13:51

2 comments:

  1. Anonymous29 November 2008 at 18:17

    Hi Stuart!

    It is funny, only now I saw your comment on http://testing.gershon.info/20070307/fitnesse-series-in-testing-thoughts-part-0/. Thanks for visiting!

    The work you've done about Fitnesse here is incredible, I liked it a lot, specially the love/hate relation with it :).

    I've linked to some posts by you in my blog, as a continuation of the Fitnesse series. Hope it is fine by you -- see the last article on http://testing.gershon.info/

    I'll come to update myself on your progress;
    Shmuel

    ReplyDelete
  2. shieldmaiden18 September 2011 at 11:19

    Hi Stuart,

    We have only just started evaluating Fitnesse as a framework for testing APIs in our product. We also found the absence of test metrics a big disadvantage. I was wondering how you are getting along with the integration of Fitnesse into Quality Center. Do you have any leads?

    Regards,
    Varsha.

    ReplyDelete

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