"The unique thing about Fit for Developing Software is the way it addresses the interface between customers/testers/analysts and programmers. All will find something in the book about how others wish to be effectively communicated with. A Fit book for programmers wouldn't make sense because the goal is to create a language for business-oriented team members. A Fit book just for businesspeople wouldn't make sense because the programmers have to be involved in creating that language. The result is a book that should appeal to a wide range of people whose shared goal is improving team communications."

--Kent Beck, Three Rivers Institute

"Even with the best approaches, there always seemed to be a gap between the software that was written and the software the user wanted. With Fit we can finally close the loop. This is an important piece in the agile development puzzle."

--Dave Thomas, coauthor of The Pragmatic Programmer

"Ward and Rick do a great job in eschewing the typical, overly complicated technology trap by presenting a simple, user-oriented, and very usable technology that holds fast to the agile principles needed for success in this new millennium."

--Andy Hunt, coauthor of The Pragmatic Programmer

"Florida Tech requires software engineering students to take a course in programmer testing, which I teach. Mugridge and Cunningham have written a useful and instructive book, which will become one of our course texts."

--Cem Kaner, Professor of Software Engineering, Florida Institute of Technology

"Rick and Ward continue to amaze me. Testing business rules is a fundamentally hard thing that has confounded many, and yet these two have devised a mechanism that cuts to the essence of the problem. In this work they offer a simple, thorough, approachable, and automatable means of specifying and testing such rules."

--Grady Booch, IBM Fellow

"By providing a simple, effective method for creating and automating tabular examples of requirements, Fit has dramatically improved how domain experts, analysts, testers, and programmers collaborate to produce quality software."

--Joshua Kerievsky, founder, Industrial Logic, Inc., and author of Refactoring to Patterns

"Agile software development relies on collaborating teams, teams of customers, analysts, designers, developers, testers, and technical writers. But, how do they work together? Fit is one answer, an answer that has been thoroughly thought through, implemented, and tested in a number of situations. Primavera has significantly stabilized its product lineusing Fit, and I'm so impressed by the results that I'm suggesting it to everyone I know. Rick and Ward, in their everlasting low-key approach, have again put the keystone in the arch of software development. Congratulations and thanks from the software development community."

--Ken Schwaber, Scrum Alliance, Agile Alliance, and codeveloper of Scrum

"Fit is the most important new technique for understanding and communicating requirements. It's a revolutionary approach to bringing experts and programmers together. This book describes Fit comprehensively and authoritatively. If you want to produce great software, you need to read this book."

--James Shore, Principal, Titanium I.T. LLC

"There are both noisy and quiet aspects of the agile movement and it is often the quieter ones that have great strategic importance. This book by Ward and Rick describes one of these absolutely vital, but often quieter, practices--testing business requirements. A renewed focus on testing, from test-driven development for developers to story testing for customers, is one of the agile community's great contributions to our industry, and this book will become one of the cornerstones of that contribution. Stories are done-done (ready for release) when they have been tested by both developers (done) and customers (done-done). The concepts and practices involved in customer story testing are critical to project success and wonderfully portrayed in this book. Buy it. Read it. Keep it handy in your day-to-day work."

--Jim Highsmith, Director of Agile Software Development & Project Management Practice, Cutter Consortium

"I have been influenced by many books, but very few have fundamentally changed how I think and work. This is one of those books. The ideas in this book describe not just how to use a specific framework in order to test our software, but also how we should communicate about and document that software. This book is an excellent guide to a tool and approach that will fundamentally improve how you think about and build software--as it has done for me."

--Mike Cohn, Mountain Goat Software, author of User Stories Applied

"Fit is a tool to help whole teams grow a common language for describing and testing the behavior of software. This books fills a critical gap--helping both product owners and programmers learn what Fit is and how to use it well."

--Bill Wake, independent consultant

"Over the past several years, I've been using Fit and FitNesse with development teams. They are not only free and powerful testing tools, they transform development by making the behavior of applications concrete, verifiable, and easily observable. The only thing that has been missing is a good tutorial and reference. Rick Mugridge and Ward Cunningham's Fit For Developing Software fits the bill. Essentially, two books in one, it is a very readable guide that approaches Fit from technical and nontechnical perspectives. This book is a significant milestone and it will make higher software quality achievable for many teams."

--Michael C. Feathers, author of Working Effectively with Legacy Code, and consultant, Object Mentor, Inc.

"Wow! This is the book I wish I had on my desk when I did my first story test-driven development project. It explains the philosophy behind the Fit framework and a process for using it to interact with the customers to help define the requirements of the project. It makes Fit so easy and approachable that I wrote my first FitNesse tests before I even I finished the book.

"For the price of one book, you get two, written by the acknowledged thought leaders of Fit testing. The first is written for the nonprogramming customer. It lays out how you can define the functionality of the system you are building (or modifying) using tabular data. It introduces a range of different kinds of 'test fixtures' that interpret the data and exercise the system under test. While it is aimed at a nontechnical audience, even programmers will find it useful because it also describes the process for interacting with the customers, using the Fit tests as the focal point of the interaction.

"The second 'book' is targeted to programmers. It describes how to build each kind of fixture described in the first book. It also describes many other things that need to be considered to have robust automated tests--things like testing without a database to make tests run faster. A lot of the principles will be familiar to programmers who have used any member of the xUnit family of unit testing frameworks. Rick and Ward show you how to put it into practice in a very easy-to-read narrative style that uses a fictitious case study to lead you through all the practices and decisions you are likely to encounter."

--Gerard Meszaros, ClearStream Consulting

The Fit open source testing framework brings unprecedented agility to the entire development process. Fit for Developing Software shows you how to use Fit to clarify business rules, express them with concrete examples, and organize the examples into test tables that drive testing throughout the software lifecycle. Using a realistic case study, Rick Mugridge and Ward Cunningham--the creator of Fit--introduce each of Fit's underlying concepts and techniques, and explain how you can put Fit to work incrementally, with the lowest possible risk. Highlights include

• Integrating Fit into your development processes

• Using Fit to promote effective communication between businesspeople, testers, and developers

• Expressing business rules that define calculations, decisions, and business processes

• Connecting Fit tables to the system with "fixtures" that check whether tests are actually satisfied

• Constructing tests for code evolution, restructuring, and other changes to legacy systems

• Managing the quality and evolution of tests

• A companion Web site (http://fit.c2.com/) that offers additional resources and source code

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 15 Ratings

Essential reading for what's likely to be a revolution in software development - 2006-11-06
Reviewer Rating:
Ward Cunningham invented CRC cards (which helped get us through the first decade of object-oriented design), many of the principles of Extreme Programming, and wikis (Wikipedia is a natural extension of his "Portland Patterns Repository").

Now he's pioneered a way to tie together the front end and tail end of software development efforts (requirements and testing), and to help technical and non-technical people work together to describe what software should do. Incidentally, he's provided a way to measure *real* progress, by tallying up what customer value has been successfully implemented.

FIT and Fitnesse haven't yet taken the software development profession by storm. Compare that to test-driven development and JUnit/xUnit, back in 1998: they took a while to catch on, but now they're an important part of the software development profession.

Want to get a heads start on the next "next thing"? Read this book.

Terrific book on a terrific testing concept - 2007-08-25
Reviewer Rating:
This book does a terrific job of making the value case for exploring and implementing FIT/Fitnesse in your software development projects. I've been really intrigued by the tools for some time now and was very happy to get a copy of this book.

The layout of this book is as unique as FIT/Fitnesse are themselves. The book's first half is targeted to business analysts and customers who team together to write up the stories for the system. The second half targets developers who will write the fixtures to tie the tables to the system. The stories and use cases are all well-done and, unlike too many other books, are on real-world situations.

There are detailed descriptions of the various fixtures supported by FIT with good examples of when you'd want to use them. The different parts of the book tie together perfectly in that the story is covered in the beginning and the developer-related sections later in the book amplify on the foundation laid earlier. I also like the Q&A portions scattered throughout the book.

The book's tone and style compliment the approach of the book, keeping it light and easy to read while laying out the immense value of FIT.

Good solid tutorial - 2007-03-08
Reviewer Rating:
A good first book/overview. Good explanation of how FIT can fit into a testing environment. A more in depth discussion of more advanced features such as using variables within tests and to set up tests would have been helpful.

Excellent Test book - 2009-04-23
Reviewer Rating:
This book gives you a different approach to complete your test cycle better. The book is well written, concepts are explained clear and examples are easy to follow. After I red it, I started to apply on my development projects with great results in defining business rules and reducing defects between releases.

Closing the communication gap... - 2006-05-06
Reviewer Rating:
Facilitating communication among businesspeople and software developers in the preparation of acceptance tests is the mail goal of Fit, which also helps automate those tests. A tabular representation of tests provides the common language whose clarity and precision are key to improving communication between technical and non-technical people. As Dave Thomas says, Fit helps closing the "gap between the software that [is] written and the software the user [wants]".

Clearly written in an informal style and easy to follow, this is a good book for learning the use of an interesting tool: Fit. It actually contains two separate books written for different audiences. The first half of the book is written for non-programmers and teaches how to define the functionality of a system using Fit tables. The second half is written for the programmers who will prepare the fixtures that mediate between the Fit tables and the system under test, so that testing can be automated.

Hype warning: Although the authors do a great job motivating the reasons for using Fit, they tend to mix the benefits of using their tool with those coming from the application of good development practices (extreme programming practices, in particular).

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