Tue, 19 Jul 2005

Fit For Developing Software Released

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

1. Fit tests express business logic, as guided, or even written, by the business experts. They lay out the functionality as seen by the customers.
2. 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.
3. 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?

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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