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by Steven E. Newton.
Original Post: Fit For Developing Software Released
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The new book on Fit,
titled, appropriately enough, Fit for Developing Software:
Framework for Integrated Tests and written by Rick Mugridge
with Ward Cunningham, has been released. It's available at Amazon,
ISBN 0321269349
My software-developer's appreciation for Fit comes from three areas of
importance to me:
Fit tests express business logic, as guided, or even written,
by the business experts. They lay out the functionality as seen by
the customers.
The test fixture code itself belongs to the developers. By that I
mean, they are not QC, integration or system tests. Developer ownership
is a big win because in the process of writing fixture to pass the tests,
developers come to understand the system better.
Fit tests are larger in scope in than unit tests. While unit tests
are critical in software development, they are not sufficient to ensure
that the business functionality is implemented in ways that satisfy
the users of the system.
This book has been called "two books in one", and I definitely
agree. The first two parts are for customers and other non-programming
team members. The latter parts are aimed at developers and have the
technical topics. Ward said that as he and Rick were working on the
book it started to get confusing, switching back and forth between the
business-facing discussions and the technical discussions. Ward felt it
best to cover the basics first, so they agreed to separate the book to
speak to the two audiences one at a time. The resulting organization
allows the book plenty of breathing room to address the needs of both
audiences.
The "Questions & Answers" sections scattered throughout the book
contain some of the most valuable gems. Here are a couple of examples
related to ActionFixture:
From Chapter 10, p 73, "Some action rows have a keyword in the last cell. Is that optional?"
From Chapter 22, p 193, "Why does the actor have to be a subclass of fit.Fixture?
You'll have to buy the book to see the answers, though!
For my part, I am hoping to bring my own Objective-C
implementation up to compliance with the 1.1 specification before
the start of Agile 2005, where
the community of Fit implementors is planning to congregate for a FIT
Unification Summit on the last day of the conference.
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