How will we preserve Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn?

On Tuesday i attended a talk by Doron Swade at the MOSI for the Computer Conservation Society.

Doron Swade is an engineer, historian, and museum professional, internationally recognized as the authority on the life and work of Charles Babbage, the 19th-century English mathematician and computer pioneer. He was Senior Curator of Computing at the Science Museum, London, for fourteen years and during this time he masterminded the eighteen-year construction of the first Babbage Calculating Engine built to original 19th-century designs. The Engine, was completed in 2002.

Doron was talking about the historical and cultural issues in the history of computing that he faced at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley, California. When something struck me.

The big kids on the block today are not the computers but the programmes they run, the software. There hasn't been any significant advancement in computing hardware for some time. However the internet is changing the way we communicate and socialise and somehow we will need to preserve it for historical interest.

But how on earth will we preserve software like Google, Twitter or FaceBook or MySpace? Because the software that powers these sites is only part of the puzzle, because with these sites its the content that makes these sites what they are. Terabytes of user generated content. How can we preserve that so that in 60 years we can look back with the same fondness we look back at the Manchester Baby, the UNIVAC or the IBM360??

Once you have wrapped your head round that task, who will test such a system? and how will the ensure that its a true representation of what those sites look like today?

While i sat there among some of the early pioneers of British computing who were gently dozing off i wondered if one day, i would be sat in that room, while tomorrows Doron tells me the problems faced with ranking the websites, facebook before twitter, or linkedin before Myspace?

• 09:17 I'm attending BarCampManchester2 -- bcman2.eventbrite.com/?ref=estw #

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If you are not thinking about perfomrance, you are not thinking

Performance testing is a funny old thing, in that whenever the subject comes up, people get all hot and bothered about it. The thing that really tickles my fancy is when developers suddenly get righteous about testing!

Testers and developers have a totally different view of the world. The best testers i have worked with have a real need to dig into systems. Even with black box testing they find a way to work out what a systems does way beyond its simple inputs and outputs. They cant help themselves. It is almost like they cant pass go if they don't break the system, almost an addiction (or is that affliction).

Now that the developers find themselves writing unit tests, integration tests and acceptance tests they think that overnight they have learnt everything there is to know about testing, right? Wrong!

Yes, sure a developer can write a test, but they often struggle with the intent of the test an more so with non functional testing like performance testing. let me shake it down.

Ok, so the business wants to monetise their existing data by presenting it in a new way, for example "Email Alerts", you know the sort of thing. You create a search, and when your criteria are met you get sent an email.

The developer sits down to think about performance testing, and thinks about how the system works. In our example here, the system will fire the searches every night, when the database is relatively quiet so that we don't overload the system during peak hours.

So the developer thinks OK I'll create a load of these "alerts" using SQL inserts and fire up the system and see how fast it can work through them.

They do just that and get back some statistics like, number of threads, amount of memory the JVM consumed, how many connections to the DB were needed, how many searches were executed, how long it took to execute a search, that sort of thing. They call meetings and stroke their chins in a sage like way. The figures look about right.

But in real life the database would never have the alerts inserted into it in that way. Its probable that users would be inserting data at the same time as it was being read out. Also the product isn't likely to go live and have 100% take up over night. Its more probable that the take up would be slower, perhaps taking weeks or months never achieving 100% take up. Old alerts would be expiring and some users would renew those while new ones are being created while some other are being edited (change of email address etc).

The crux of the matter is mindset. The tester sits down and thinks, what could go wrong? What happens if the DB is unavailable at the time the batch job runs? What happens if the DB needs to be taken down for maintenance during a batch run, will the batch pick up where it left off? Can the batch job complete before the off peak period comes to an end? Can the mail server handle the number of emails to be sent? What happens to email that bounces? In other words the tester takes a step back and looks at the system holistically. Because a user doesn't give a damn if your search engine can execute a query in 33ms if they don't get the email until 12hours after it was relevant.

Now on the current project we have completely rewritten the platform. New version of Java, new styles of writing code, new infrastructure etc etc. The search engine technology is the same, however during the life of the project the API has been updated and a particular feature enabled. This feature allows us to search in a related way. Generally speaking it allows us to do the Amazon type thing; "People who search for X also search for Y", but it comes at a cost, it takes longer to return the result set (of course it would its got to do another search under the hood).

Again during "testing" the developers just threw as much load as they could muster at the application. But guess what, now its live the figures they got during testing don't match, not even close.

It isn't like hadn't been bleating on about performance for months. I even printed out posters that read "If you are not thinking about performance, you are not thinking" and stuck them above the urinals in the toilets.

Its only now that the team are in the spotlight (its so bright it burns) that they have come to us to ask for our help. Once again we are trying to polish a rough product instead of building the quality in from the start. Once again we cant.

It doesn't matter a damn that we went all out Agile, TDD and XP if the thing doesn't perform. The end user doesn't care that we have continuous integration, they know its damn slow and they vote with their feet (or keyboards/mouse).

Skills not Roles - Communities not Teams.

When i decided to put this blog together, part of the impetus was using it as a historical repository. There are a great many of my posts on the internet today that date back to 1999. Ten years is a fairly long time in internet years, and looking back over those posts i can see how my understanding of different topics has evolved and how much I've learnt and grown. That said, its not going to work (a historical record) if i don't post anything is it!

The reason i haven't posted for quite some time is two fold. Simply put I've been too busy at work and too busy at home. That is to say, the blog has had to take a back seat. I'm sorry I'll try harder.

OK on to the post proper.

---

So this post will differ in that i'm not going to discuss technologies like Twist or Selenium or WebDriver.

I want to talk about something that is currently crippling the project I'm currently working on.

For a project to be truly Agile and Lean it needs to be able to respond to the challenges that we face daily in IT and overcome the challenges without waste. So why then do we have to hand off tasks like deployments to another non Agile team? Moreover the handover is done via an abhorrent "work-flow" tool that admonishes the receiving team from any aspect of quality or responsibility "I've done my bit mate, its with team X now".

I want to get rid of teams as we know and recognise them today and usher in communities. Yeah sure the name is a bit hippy-ish but then so is the ideal. Skills not roles. If someone within our delivery community has the necessary skills to deploy some code to a database or server then why do we have to interface with an external team? If we have the capability, and we are responsible, what's the problem?

OK, sure, the guys who look after the production systems want to achieve 99.999% uptime (26 seconds of downtime a month), and often they are targeted on this so they become averse to change. After all any change increases the risk of a failure. However, if we have tested the code, not once, not twice, but umpteen times and more importantly we only compiled the code only once, and all previous deployments have gone without incident. You could be forgiven for thinking that the deployment could be considered as being safe for deployment. A non event. We should be able to deploy the code at 17:30 on a Friday afternoon and skip off home safe in the knowledge that the site is up and running, humming along like a well oiled machine.

However, those teams have become so averse to change or risk as they perceive it, that they actually start to display behaviours reminiscent of the 1970 trade union shenanigans that plagued British industry "you can't do that mate, not your job. Not anyone can deploy code you know, oh no. where would we be if just any old tom, dick or harry could deploy code willy nilly".

As an Agile commune focused on delivery of our project we would share the skills and socialise ideas. We need to create innovative environments that promote people trying new things. This aids the members of the community which therefore benefits the business. So not anyone could deploy the code. Only those people that had the skills and were responsible in the execution of their duties.

The more i think about this, the clearer it all becomes. I suddenly find myself questioning my own role as a "people manager" within such a community. After all my role as in its current shape would be wasteful. I should not manage the team (to be honest, that's not my natural style) I should coach and mentor, not preach and target. I should lead by example, not autocratic rule. As Alan Keith of Genentech said "Leadership is ultimately about creating a way for people to contribute to making something extraordinary happen."

I've run this idea past my peers. Old peers agree with me, they see it as a way to empower individuals, and therefore the community they reside in. But younger, less wise peers are worried. "How will we administer pay grades" they ask, "how will we hire people, if we don't have recognised roles".

Its really quite simple. Individuals are rewarded for the skills they have not their ranking within a role. Why should an experienced tester with polygot skills and several years domain knowledge be paid less than a BA with flaky knowledge of your technology platform? What because business analysts traditionally earn more than testers? For that matter why should a developer be paid more than a business analyst if the BA can also test? Two skills vs one. The current game is rigged and is demotivational.

Hiring is also easy. You want titles for your people? Call them analysts. Then all you need to do is hire analysts with the appropriate skills for your domain and your platform. Other companies call their staff "consultants", and they hire consultants with the appropriate skills for the client they engage with.

Once you have a pool of multi skilled analysts, it would be easier to create a community that had the right skills required to deliver the project, instead of worrying about the interfaces to external teams or having a shortfall of a particular discipline within your community. You can select your community members based on their proven experience, their skills, their domain knowledge and the feedback they receive from the communities they have previously worked in. A community is unlikely to carry a lazy person who knows little about the domain and has few or poor skills.

Now i'm not saying we don't need SysAdmin or DBA or networks etc. We need all those teams, and what they do is invaluable to the delivery of the project. But do those external teams need to perform what amounts to mundane tasks for us? Shouldn't they concentrate on what's important to them, the stability and performance of their area. Because as it stands today at the point we interface with those external teams for the execution of a task that could be carried out in-team by an appropriately skilled and responsible analyst, they become a blocker and they become wasteful. We sit twiddling our thumbs while we wait for those teams to follow their internal processes and use the infernal work-flow tool (and its only real purpose is to provide the business with yet more meaningless statistics).

When i have approached the external teams, i have found that they harbour a fear of "Agile" and i think this fear is the real problem. They feel uncomfortable, anxious, or inadequate. They worry that by allowing us to be responsible for our actions then they will be allowing themselves to be exploited and by denying us it helps protect their rights as an individual.

The business feels the same way. Despite the corporate line being "we are Agile, lean, innovative..." they fear change to the point that they have implemented a change management process, and a change manager and recently said we have to use sharepoint (ffs). But what the business hasn't realised is that as a tester i am risk averse (no really its a curse), so we are actively baking the quality into our products and continuously inspecting them for that quality - through unit testing, integration testing, and acceptance testing.

It will be incredibly hard for the external teams let go, especially while the business is frozen with fear, but in the future they will have to. They will have to or we may as well pack up and go back to PrinceII - not while there is breath left in my body...

Life after ThoughtWorks?

After working with ThoughtWorks I’m completely sold on Agile software development for the type of product we deliver. Which if you know me may be a bit of a surprise as I have a reputation for being a cynical old curmudgeon, and a staunch doubter to boot.

While I am still unsure if agile would work for large scale software projects (think air traffic control) I am certain that there are agile practices (lean for example) that could be pilfered and applied to those lumbering projects too. If you are reading this and you haven’t had any exposure to Agile, I guess the biggest thing I should tell you is that this isn’t some process you just pick up and run with, nor is it a methodology to apply. You can’t learn it from a book, or by a project template; it is quite simply a mindset and as such it presents the practitioner with quite a shift in paradigm. Simply put, you can’t flick a big agile switch and hey presto you are Agile; it is more subtle than that.

I think before I continue it’s important that I clarify something. The term agile is applied to a wide variety of processes, techniques, methods, tools, practices, projects, and phases of the development life cycle; it has become a buzzword used by people trying to paint their work in a new light (who doesn't want to be known as being agile?). It's important, therefore, to set out some basic definitions and context for the use of the term "agile," especially as i will use it constantly throughout this article.

Within the context of software development, the term "agile" (with a small "a") is meant to imply that the development team is nimble, flexible and responsive to the business needs, and that it is able to adopt new technologies and techniques that can improve software delivery. The term "Agile" (with a capital "A") refers to a very specific set of processes (and i use the term process as more of a place holder) applied to software development that have evolved over the past fifteen years or so; including some you have probably heard of, like eXtreme Programming (XP), Scrum, Feature-driven Development (FDD), Crystal, Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM) and Lean Software Development. A non-profit organisation The Agile Alliance was created by the ideas people behind most of the Agile processes. The Agile Alliance promotes a set of core values that a process must follow to be called Agile:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan

So to be Agile then, a process must support these values (and more), albeit in diverse ways. Some, processes for example like Scrum, address team management, while others such as XP or DSDM, address development activities or other activities of the software development life cycle. It’s worth making a mental note that users of Agile processes do not have to follow all its Agile practices, and neither does the use of one process preclude the use of any other. One thing I learnt is that Agile supports such process change, if a particular way of working is not working then change. In fact many I found that many of the Agile practices are complimentary.

No matter your preference, all of the different flavours of Agile will deliver working functionality in short time-boxed iterations. They implement early and frequent testing. They require lots of involvement from the customer on a frequent if not full-time basis and they assume that the customers requirements will continually change.

So why all the fuss about big "A" little "a" when talking about Agile? There are two main reasons:

1. Companies who adopt Agile processes have to be prepared to completely change the way they not only develop software but how they think, and this change is so big it is very hard to do. However companies that have achieved this shift will appreciate the significant benefits they can reap in productivity, quality and value of the software that they deliver. Notice i didn't say it would be faster. These companies are Agile with a capital A.
   


2. Companies that are not able to embark on this level of change can still become more reactive and flexible in the ways that they build software. They become more agile and begin to realise the advantage that Agile can deliver. This toe dipping exercise can lead to a true Agile team, however the company must understand that it's not the prefferable way, and they would benefit from the gung-ho approach to Agile adoption.

To reiterate what i've said, at a minimum, every Agile process delivers working functionality in short, time-boxed iterations. Agile implements early and frequent testing, and it involves the customer on a frequent if not full-time basis; and assumes that requirements cannot be fully defined at the start of a project, and that the requirements will continually change. The ethos is simple that by using these practices, the development teams will be able to respond quickly to the ever changing customer priorities and feedback, and deliver value to the business. This is often missunderstood as being quicker, I would prefer to describe it as improved time to benefits.

As a tester I have become quite accustomed to being involved late in a project, often right before delivery. I have adapted and learnt how to cope with shortened time frames for testing, and receiving specifications and requirement documentation that don’t actually match the product delivered in QA. Typically the business (or for that matter the project team) usually has little interest in the test teams input, that is until they call us a bottle neck.

Feeling loved and appreciated.

Agile software development for a tester is radically different from the traditional PRINCE(2)/waterfall software development lifecycle (SDLC), because it throws QA right into the heart of project on day one. As Agile testers we suddenly found ourselves being involved in the analysis and design of the product. We became heavily involved in decision-making throughout the whole project and because the delivery of the software is incremental we found that we began testing at the very beginning of the project and that we had to maintain pace and keep step with development to prevent any delay. This is a far cry from waiting for a software deliverable (possibly unfit for purpose) to be thrown over the fence a few weeks before go live.

The paradigm shift I have mentioned is a large one, not just for QA but the whole project team, because our QA team now drives the entire software development process.

Quality assurance, with its focus on preventing defects, is translated into the agile practice of having committed QA resources on the development team that participate in decision-making on a daily basis, throughout the life cycle of the project.

Their input during elaboration and design helps developers write better code. More “what-if” scenarios are considered and planned for, as the collaboration between coders and testers gives the coders more insights than if they were to have planned the work on their own.
Likewise, the testers gain added insight into the expected functionality from the coders and the product owner, and are able to write more effective test cases for the product.
Quality control places its emphasis on finding defects that have already slipped into the system, and working with developers to eliminate those defects. This bug-checking is done within the iteration, using such techniques such as daily builds and smoke tests, automated regression testing, unit testing, functional and exploratory testing, and acceptance testing. Everyone participates – no one is exempt from the tasks of ensuring that the feature coded meets the customer’s expectations.

Your role morphs and evolves.

Through a methodology known as "Story Test Driven Development" the test requirements (aka the acceptance tests) are captured (we currently use Twist) in a test like format and they are then augmented to make them into automated tests. Nothing unusual in that, lots of test teams create automated tests, however here the automated tests are being executed by the development team not the test team and the tests exist before the development team have even created the code for the software the team is delivering. The real beauty of this method is that the development team can then integrate the automated tests into a Continuous Integration environment, where the newly checked in code is built and tested automatically. So the QA teams test suite is run against the code every time a change gets checked in. But wait, that’s not all. The delivery of code into QA can not happen until it has passed all of our tests, which means that we have built the quality in from the very start. Let me state that again, in case you missed it. The development team can not deliver code into QA until it has passed the QA teams tests. That’s a statement that should raise a lot of internal debate with any passionate tester who hasn’t worked in this way before, and it did with us. Its worth me making the distinction here that Test Driven Development (TDD) is not a testing methodology it’s a design methodology. Being testers we have a very different view of the world to a developer, its in very our nature. Working this way felt like we had harnessed our power and put it where it belongs, under the smelting pot of code.
I should also mention here that the developers were also working in a new way, because they worked in pairs (pair programming) and also used TDD at unit level. This means that a developer has to write a unit test before he writes the code for the unit being developed. That means then, that before its delivered to QA, our code has been tested twice. That’s two times tested.

So if development is running the QA teams tests, and the QA team are writing the automated tests (and its blurry line between coding and writing an automated test), and the code is tested before its delivered to QA, a whole load of question begin to bubble up.

Some of early questions we had:

1. Who tests the testers’ tests?
2. This is agile, so what happens if the requirements change?
3. So what do QA test if it’s already passed the QA tests?

On a typical PRINCE(2)/waterfall project the testing team plans as far in advance as it can. We normally try to follow the IEEE 829-1983 standard and document as much as we can.
The documentation covers how we approach the testing and detail the testing activities. These documents are usually created in isolation from the project team and may be published for approval. However in my experience the documents are rarely scrutinised and any feedback given only serves to pay lip service to the processes. Another checkbox checked, and another Gant chart milestone met.

Working in an agile testing environment also has a requirement to define which tools and methods will be used for writing, executing, and reporting tests and determine the best approach to testing, and the scope of that testing. The big difference is that the whole team is engaged in this deterministic process and we found that it was important to engage the developers in this definition, because they would be executing our tests and writing their own unit tests. Moreover thought had to be given to automating the regression testing, something that would happen as part of the continuous integration process.
The business stakeholders were also involved in this process (unfortunately only by proxy through the business analysts, as they are physically located in a different part of the country) as they would help to define and run the acceptance tests. In agile, we (the whole team) all test, but the business accepts.

In short within agile practices, everyone has a contributory part in defining, upholding, and improving the quality of the product.

One of the gotchas was that we found that we needed to become more technical. We had thought that we were already more technically skilled than your average tester, however as we endeavoured to automate our testing we found that we had to skill up and learn not just how to write code (Java for us), but compile the code and version control it. They were steep, steep learning curves, which now we have overcome them, have empowered us, giving us the tools for a brighter, faster and more accurate future. Having said that, it does appear that some of this coding effort could be considered a one off setup task, because we now have a framework of “tools” that cover all of the tasks we need to help us execute an automated test. Couldn’t we have asked the development team to do the tech tasks for us? We did, and they didn’t have any resource free to accommodate our needs as well as those of the agile project. Regardless, we have skills now that we have been able to share with the wider QA team, and they too are seeing the fruits of our initial labour.

Traditional Tools Solve Traditional Problems in Traditional Contexts. Agile Is Not Traditional.

Traditional, heavyweight, record-and-playback tools (like Quality Center) address the challenges faced by teams operating in a traditional context with specialisms. They address the challenge of having non-programmers automate tests by having record-and-playback features, a simplified editing environment, and a simplified programming language.

But Agile teams don’t need tools like these (optimised for non-programmers). What Agile test teams need are tools to solve an entirely different set of challenges that are related to collaborating, communicating, reducing the waste (Muda), and decrease the feedback loop. Ergo, traditional (long standing) test automation tools just don’t cut the mustard in an Agile context because they are designed to solve traditional problems, in traditional contexts and those really are quite different to the challenges faced by Agile test teams. To make it clear, QC & TD isn't going to cut it in Agile.

At the Google Tech Talks December 9, 2005 Elisabeth Hendrickson gave a talk on how as more teams are adopting Agile practices such as XP and Scrum, software testing teams are being asked to become "Agile" as well... View it here

Using Twist With Different Selenium Versions

When you start using Twist you will find that the twist team have baked selenium into twist.
You will also find that the version of selenium that has been integrated has some quirks.

Here is a simple guide for using any Selenium version with Twist.

You can also use this guide to help you implement other drivers like WebDriver.

Step 1
Add the selenium-java-client-driver.jar and the selenium-server.jar of your preferred selenium release (I'm going to be using my old friend selenium.0.9.2) to the Twist project class path, make sure these jars are loaded first in the class path order.


Step 2
You need to create a factory class that will create the Selenium instance for your test suite.

For example, let’s create "SeleniumFactory.java" in the Twist source folder.

import java.io.FileInputStream; import java.util.Properties;
import org.apache.tools.ant.types.Commandline;
import org.openqa.selenium.server.RemoteControlConfiguration;
import org.openqa.selenium.server.SeleniumServer;
import org.openqa.selenium.server.cli.RemoteControlLauncher;
import com.thoughtworks.selenium.DefaultSelenium;
import com.thoughtworks.selenium.Selenium;

public class SeleniumFactory { private SeleniumServer server; private Selenium selenium; }

public void start() {
try {
Properties properties = new Properties();
properties.load(new FileInputStream(getClass().getClassLoader().getResource("twist.properties").getFile()));
}

String[] serverOptions = Commandline.translateCommandline((String) properties.get("selenium.server.options"));
RemoteControlConfiguration serverConfiguration = RemoteControlLauncher.parseLauncherOptions(serverOptions);
String browserLauncher = (String) properties.get("selenium.browserLauncher");
String browserURL = (String) properties.get("selenium.browserURL");

server = new SeleniumServer(serverConfiguration);
server.start();

selenium = new DefaultSelenium("localhost", serverConfiguration.getPort(), browserLauncher, browserURL);
selenium.start();

} catch (Exception e) {
throw new RuntimeException(e);
}

public void stop() {
try {
if (selenium != null) {
selenium.stop();
}
} finally {
if (server != null) {
server.stop();
}
}
}

public Selenium geSelenium() {
return selenium;
}


Step 3
We now need to remove any bean definitions with id="seleniumFactory" and id="selenium" from the applicationContext-suite.xml file.
You will have to manually edit, the "applicationContext-suite.xml" of the twist project, and add the following bean definitions.

Step 4
The workflows will now have to depend on the Selenium interface.

For example,
public NewWorkflow(Selenium selenium) {
this.selenium = selenium;
}

With the above changes, your scenarios will be now use the selenium server and driver jars included in “step a”.

Note:

The selenium options are not the same between releases. The beta-2 release of Selenium RC contains some significant changes you should be aware of. You will need to account for these and change these values in "twist.properties" as required.

For example:

selenium 0.9.2 config : selenium.browserLauncher = *firefox
selenium 1.o Beta 2 config : selenium.browserLauncher = *firefoxproxy

selenium 0.9.2 config : selenium.server.options = -port 4545 -avoidProxy
selenium 1.o Beta 2 config : selenium.server.options = -port 4545 -avoidProxy -honor-system-proxy -singleWindow

For a full list of the changes take a look at http://clearspace.openqa.org/community/selenium/blog/2009/01/13/selenium-rc-beta-2-goodies-and-gotchas

Choosing Twist - Part two

The next Big Thing

Enter our next big project. We (the QA team) held a huddle to talk about the capability of Fit and FitNesse for the new project. We all agreed that we would sooner avoid it if at all possible, in fact the language used during the meeting was much stronger that that. It was around that time I was shown a demo install of Twist, and immediately asked the question to the guy showing me “what is the problem I have with FitNesse that Twist will resolve?”, he looked at me as if I was crazy then reeled off all of the pain points that we knew and then some.

It’s worth having a look I thought, and installed the 30 day trial. One of the guys who had been very instrumental in fighting the FitNesse issues also installed it, and we said we would take a look at it and then compare notes.

At first we didn’t get it, but some things are very apparent with Twist.

For those of you that don’t know, Twist is built on top of the eclipse IDE, I should mention here (for existing Eclipse users), that it’s not currently available as a plug-in for an existing eclipse install (however that feature is in the programme plan). That means it comes with the entire feature set that eclipse does, e.g. integration with source control (CVS or SVN for example) albeit via a plug-in. The team write their tests, run them locally to make sure they work, and commit.













Search
You can search across your code, files or project. Search and replace across an open file or the whole project.







Keyword completion.

This last feature is biggie for us. If you create a method call UserOpensUrl then the next time you type v-e-r and press Ctrl+Space it pops up a list of matching methods.

straight away people can see what methods that have the phrase “ver” in them have already been written.

If you have used eclipse before, then all the usual features and short cut keys you love are available (I’m still learning new ones every day).

But what about twist? What does that bring to the party?

The most striking thing is the WYSYWIG scenario editor.














If you have grappled with fitnesse then the ability to make text Bold and Italic with the click of a button is great.




Not having to remember any mark-up language allows you to concentrate on the task in hand, writing tests.

The scenarios are broken down into several areas. The first part is where you write your test prose, the purpose or intent of the test. The second part is where the test proper is written.



Tests are currently written using either bullet points or tables.

And just like fitnesse a passed test turns green.




The stats for all the tests are given in a separate panel

The scenario editor allows a scenario to have one or more tags associated with it. These can be tags such as “QA Complete” or “shopping cart” or “smoke” or all three or none. These tags come into their own when you only want to run particular types of test. E.g. if you only want to execute tests that are QA Complete and are for the Shopping Cart area of your site; this is especially useful for CI builds.

Tags can be applied at a scenario level (while you are editing a scenario) or then can be applied or removed en masse.



When you have written your tests they need to be instrumented.
This can be achieved in a number of ways. Either right click and select Quick Fix from the context menu


Or use the quick-key combination of Ctrl+1 and you are presented with another context menu

“Create method” simply creates an appropriately named empty method ready for you to work on.

Again this is great where you don’t have development skills within your team as your team can focus on writing the scenarios and the dev team work on instrumenting the empty methods.


Choosing Record from the context menu starts a selenium server (which only currently supports Firefox) and fires up firefox. The record system differs a liitle bit in that it first runs though any previous steps in test if you have written any, then begins recording at the new point in your test, and completes the method.


I have only touched on a few good points here, those which counter the main pain points we had with Fitnesse. One of the communities biggest gripes with Twist is the lack of good documentation. Which when you consider it is a paid for product is a little shameful.

i should also point out that while i was writing this post, ThoughtWorks Studios release the first GA version of Twist, which i have yet to try out....