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I have read about Fitnesse in a number of books but when I look on the web I don't see much activity with it.

And a newbie question - how does fitnesse fit into the Selenium world? Are they equivalent ways of solving the same problem or do they fit together somehow? Is fitnesse going anywhere? Why does no one seem to be talking about it, (or do I just look in the wrong places).

I guess I need a 50,000 foot view of Fitnesse and how it fits in the automated testing tools world.

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  • Please do not ask multiple questions in one post. I suggest you try to split it, although I'm not sure if the "State of play" part would qualify as a real and helpful question (see FAQ).
    – Alois Mahdal
    Commented May 20, 2012 at 21:43
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    I'm not a regular user of this forum, but personally I would hope that this is a great way to get a 'state of play' on particular tools, are they in use, are there better things out there etc. All from the experts on this forum. If not what do you suggest?
    – carolineggordon
    Commented May 21, 2012 at 5:28
  • The main point is that you have two questions in one post: 1 - "state of play" 2 - fitnesse & selenium. This is dangerous because you actually split potential answerers into two groups (those answering 1 and those answering 2) but you can only accept one answer. Please read this question, it says it quite well.
    – Alois Mahdal
    Commented May 21, 2012 at 9:22
  • Then the other point is that question like "state of play of XYZ" may be interesting now, but actually the correctness of any the answer is likely to change over time. Also it is quite vague...
    – Alois Mahdal
    Commented May 21, 2012 at 9:30
  • So what I suggest is splitting the Q by removing the "state" part from this Q. Leave the F&S other part as a) there already are two relevant answers and b) it is a good, interesting question that is likely to help people and earn you rep---also in future. If you really want to ask the other part, ask it separately.
    – Alois Mahdal
    Commented May 21, 2012 at 9:36

5 Answers 5

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FitNesse has not received the levels of adoption that other open source testing tools have. FitNesse pre-dates the use of Behaviour Driven Development tools and frameworks (Cucumber, Specflow, RSpec).

Whilst there are no doubt users of FitNesse who will love it, I have personally found the wiki-html table-esque keyword driven style in practice does not lend itself to the clean designs that you can achieve with the well supported BDD tools like Cucumber.

How does this relate to Selenium? Selenium can serve as an execution engine on the "back end" of a test automation stack that is driven by Cucumber or FitNesse. When used like this, FitNesse and Cucumber are used as a way to document the test from the point of view of the business domain.

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    Although this sounds reasonable and valid, it does not answer the question "How do fitnesse and selenium work together". (Nor the other, which was thankfully been edited out by you.)
    – Alois Mahdal
    Commented May 22, 2012 at 11:41
  • That is a very valid point of view. I disagree as I think my answer as a polite way of saying. " I don't think it does"
    – Bruce McLeod
    Commented May 24, 2012 at 21:30
  • Then that idea is completely hidden in the answer. (You don't even mention Selenium at all!) As I understand it, you are basically saying that fitnesse is obsolete and it does not lead to clean design. Interesting indeed, but NaA.
    – Alois Mahdal
    Commented May 28, 2012 at 7:38
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I too have found Fitnesse to be a bit clunky compared with some of the more 'modern' BDD tools around.

With regard to using Selenium and Fitnesse, take a look at the Xebium plugin. It was written by a Dutch company for their use and is freely available on Github. I have not used Xebium on a project, but did use the Selenium IDE plugin to export recorded scripts to Fitnesse syntax and they seemed ok.

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I have never used Fitnesse, but here is what I gleaned from the documentation. Fitnesse is a tool for organizing and running tests. You write fixtures to translate Fitnesse's representation of a test into an actual action that tests something (e.g. an call into an application API).

You could write fixtures that call the Selenium API. That is how Fitnesse and Selenium would fit together.

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Actually there is a project on GitHub called Selenesse with this aim:

Selenesse is the modern bridge between FitNesse and Selenium.

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Some teams I coached in Sydney not so long ago began using FitNesse from day 1 of their agile adoption after years of test-last using QTP. It's wiki-based interface is excellent and IMO is still a weak point of many other ATDD/BDD tools re bridging the communication gap with non-technical folk. FitNesse fixtures typically plug straight into the business logic which means they don't break so much when you reconfigure the UI (unlike a lot of UI-based testing automated tests). For that and the accessibility of the integrated wiki I like it a lot more than most Selenium setups I hear about. The FIT test system was re-architected not so long ago (as SLIM) and I consider FitNesse an up-to-date and highly relevant tool. I think it's a pity that more people don't use it to get non-technical people engaged with specification by example.

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  • This does not answer the question at all.
    – Alois Mahdal
    Commented May 21, 2012 at 9:32
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    To be fair, it did answer the question as originally asked (in that it describes the "state of play"). It doesn't answer the question as it is after editing, but I think it was a reasonable response at the time it was written.
    – testerab
    Commented May 23, 2012 at 20:47

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