Binding Business Requirements to Code
By admin on Feb 1, 2010 in .NET, open source
SpecFlow
SpecFlow aims at bridging the communication gap between domain experts and developers by binding business readable behavior specifications to the underlying implementation.
The mission is to provide a pragmatic and frictionless approach to Acceptance Test Driven Development and Behavior Driven Development for .NET projects today.
SpecFlow is open source (BSD License).
Concordion
Concordion is an acceptance testing framework that allows users to place their specifications in HTML file. These files contain references to fixtures in test code that are executed by Concordion.
Concordion is mainly aimed at the development team that consists of analysts/clients and developers working together in an agile fashion. The analysts/clients work together with the developer to write the specifications in HTML. The developers then write their fixtures in a .NET language and Concordion runs the two together producing red/green results like a unit test.
FitNesse
FitNesse is a great web-based collaboration tool for software acceptance testing. It enables software developers and business people to build a shared understanding of the domain and helps produce software that is genuinely fit for purpose.
Framework for Integrated Testing (FIT) is an acceptance testing framework originally developed for Java by Ward Cunningham. One of the central ideas of FIT was to promote collaboration and allow customers and business analysts to write and verify tests. FIT makes it easy to run tests, but does not provide a way to create them. The original idea was to write tests in Word, Excel, or any tool that can output HTML.
FitNesse is a web wiki front-end to FIT. Today, it is the most popular choice for running FIT tests. It provides an integrated environment in which we can write and execute tests and speeds up the job with quite a few useful shortcuts. Although FitNesse was also written in Java, it was not heavily integrated with FIT, but executed it as an external program. This turned out to be a very good idea, as it was possible to plug in different test runners. After the FIT/FitNesse combination became popular in the Java world, test runners were written for other environments including C++, Python and .NET.
