FitNesse is a great Web-based collaboration tool for software testing, which can really help to testdrive the code and build a framework for holding the project together during big changes and refactoring. It makes writing and running automated tests easy and allows test-driven software teams to share knowledge and expectations.

Under the hub, FitNesse runs FIT (Framework for Integrated Testing). Both FitNesse and FIT are open-source tools, and together they are very popular as a testing framework in the Java community. Although FitNesse supports testing .Net code, some things don't quite work out of the box or do not follow official on-line documentation. However, the integration is stable, and I guarantee that the effort required to start using FitNesse is worth it.

This is a guide to help you get started with FitNesse. I will not try to make a case for automated tests or test-driven development here, nor explain all the benefits of FitNesse. Here are just a few advantages of using FIT/FitNesse combination for testing:

- It is easy to write complex tests
- Tests are easy to read and understand
- FitNesse promotes collaboration between team members (and customers)
- Test-specific code is very thin, and it looks much more like an integration layer then typical testing code

Author: Gojko Adzic
Published: December 26, 2006