Our team has been working with FitNesse for a couple months and I believe we are getting over the learning "hump". A question came up today and I think we came up with a good solution and I wanted to share it with others who may be in transition period with FitNesse.
We aren't able to create FitNesse tests for all the functionality within the system so we do have some manual tests we need to verify are working. We need to track the manual tests within FitNesse so naturally we created a fixture!
Our "manual test" fixture contains 2 columns: Description and Passed. Description contains the manual test case and Passed contains the DATE the test passed. Entering the date allows us to track the last time the test passed. The fixture also takes a parameter for the number of days between manual tests.
!|Run Manual Tests Every|90|Days|
|Description|Passed|
|Do some manual test|5/18/2006|
When the fixture runs, it checks if the manual tests have passed within the configured time period. If not it will throw an error and provide visibly to aging manual test results.
Manual tests are not the ideal solution, however, by tracking the manual tests and their age we can provide a stop gap solution while teams are working to automate their user acceptance tests. It also gets the non-technical team members familiar with FitNesse syntax and hopefully prepare them to speak in the language of "FitNesse".
Have you or your team created a custom fixture to solve a problem? Please leave a comment and let me know.
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