XPDAY5: Story Telling with FIT

This session was presented by Steve Freeman and Mike Hill. Using FIT is a great way to produce automated acceptance tests, but the underlying message of the session was: The act of designing and writing the FIT documents can be an effective means of communicating with the customer. This can help us understand the details of a user story and identify suitable acceptance criteria, which tell us when we're done. The role playing between Steve [the techie] and Mike [the busy customer] was a 'giggle' and demonstrated how well this communication mechanism can work.

Two exercises were conducted. The audience was split into 9 groups and each handed a description of business requirements. Each group was tasked with identifying, and then writing some FIT test documents on paper. A member of each group would then show the test documents to another group to see if they could understand what the original requirement was. After a period of time, the person presenting the test document would explain the requirement to the group. Then the fun part. The presenter had to turn their back to the group while they criticised the test document. Steve enthusiastically encouraged people not to hold back. This situation emulated the conversation that developers often have amongst themselves when the customer has gone away.

Here's a test document that we literally stuck together, uh-hem, i mean produced iteratively:


fit
Originally uploaded by sjb140470.

I came out of this session enthused to use FIT tests in the same way that Steve and Mike had been using them. On a current project, we've been using the Fit Library but to produce acceptance tests used at the iteration review meeting. Our difficulty in using the Fit Library effectively has been the investment time required to produce the tests. I asked Steve what percentage of their iteration was dedicated to producing FIT tests. He replied "One third". I guess we need more practice and the room to do it.

It would be useful to get a copy of the presentation slides.

See also:
Read how James Shore uses FIT. His post concludes a series of articles he has written on FIT.

Resources:
FitLibrary
FIT Consolidation
FitNesse
Selenium

Recommended reading:




Tags: agile, user stories, fitnesse, xpday5

posted by Simon Baker @ permalink
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