Another recommendation: check out Exactor (I think I also mentioned this at XP2006). It’s a lot like Fit but without the compulsory tables and based much more around a plain text format. It’s a sourceforge project too, run by the guys at Exoftware. It has a much smaller user base though, of course.

Then there’s my own TextTest, but that works a little differently to Fitlibrary and Exactor - though it’s also grown up around the same desire to provide domain language tests for customers on agile projects.

Whoever implemented the excel reader for Fit caused negative PR for the product, because whenever you give people Office support they infect the whole process or product with the Office “philosophy”

I also agree on the importance of textual formats, but to be honest, excel is quite usable if you save the table as CSV. In fact, CSV as a syntax is very wiki-like so excel is Just Another Editor for it.

I don’t know Fit very well, but IMHO the main philosophy behind it is to use tables as a metalanguage to easily create custom languages for tests. Data in a table is already separated as tokens so the lexer phase isn’t needed when parsing the language.

Of course, as many people have pointed out, tabular syntax isn’t suitable for everything. That’s why I believe Fit will be replaced by some more general metalanguage that enables the creation of a richer set of syntaxes and maybe also provides some (partly) general purpose language for more complex test semantics.

I mostly agree with you. However, I do like the abstraction Fit provides which allows specs to be written independently of the implementation.

Normally when working with JUnit, such abstractions are extracted after a lot of tests have been created.

I am very inclined to see what can be done with Ruby-based DSL instead of the tables.

I haven’t looked it up, but Excels XML format will most probably be enclosed in a zipped file, much like OpenDocument.

And even if it was a plain text XML-file, it would not be readable. Again, look at the XML produced by OpenDocument.

regarding the issue of VERSION CONTROL with excel’s binary format — soon, you will be able to save excel files in XML format!!

BR, ~A

Really, the question for me comes down to: who is writing these things. If the customer/non-technical BA is, then I understand the desire for using a tool like this. But in my experience, projects that start out with the customer/non-technical BA writing the tests, end up with the developers eventually taking over the actual development and maintenance the tests. Because of this experience, my first inclination on many projects is to just skip the fancy UI and write the darn integration tests using JUnit, a tool that is known and familiar to developers.