Ovid wrote:
Has anyone here ever succesfully used FIT testing? I was at one of the first presentations of FITness a long time ago, but the example Ward Cunningham gave was of a calculator. I thought the idea was neat, but how would I implement it?
When you say "implement it" do you mean the mechanics of it or in a "when can it be of use" sense?
We've considered FITness testing, but so far, the only person I've met who claims success with it is a consultant to teaches it. Everyone else has claimed no experience or that it's more hassle than it's worth.
Tony Bowden has had success with it. It's most useful when the people with the knowledge of how the thing is supposed to work aren't programmers. Acceptance testing. I do X, I expect Y. This works well with well defined, deterministic behaviors. Here's an employee and their salary, what taxes and fees do we take out of their payroll?
Or for units where the field of test data is very, very broad (yet the inputs and outputs are simple) and you want to employ cheap labor to test it. In Tony's case, as I remember, he employed his nephew to test a contact information web scraper. His nephew went to a random web page and eyeballed it for any contact information. He wrote down the URL and contact info in a simple table. Harness slurps in that table and compares what it found with what the human found. Fast way to get a big wad of real world test data. A programmer would be way more expensive and probably not do nearly as good a job as they'd get bored.
-- E: "Would you want to maintain a 5000 line Perl program?" d: "Why would you write a 5000 line program?"
