Improving our fitnesse: From concrete executions to partial specification

Fitnesse and FIT [5] allow systems tests to be written by non-programmers using a Wiki or HTML style of input. However, there is little support for syntactic and semantic checks as the tests are being designed. This paper describes a support tool for designing table-based test cases that gives deep semantic analysis about a set of test cases. It uses a variety of strategies such as pairwise analysis, boundary value analysis and test case subsumption to suggest missing test cases and to generalise concrete tests into more abstract tests. The goal is to interactively improve the quality of test suites during the test design phase

Evolving web-based test automation into agile business specifications

Usually, test automation scripts for a web application directly mirror the actions that the tester carries out in the browser, but they tend to be verbose and repetitive, making them expensive to maintain and ineffective in an agile setting. Our research has focussed on providing tool-support for business-level, example-based specifications that are mapped to the browser level for automatic verification. We provide refactoring support for the evolution of existing browser-level tests into business-level specifications. As resulting business rule tables may be incomplete, redundant or contradictory, our tool provides feedback on coverage

Test driven development and the scientific method

The scientific method serves as a good metaphor for several practices in Extreme Programming (XP). We explore the commonalities and differences and show that the scientific method, by analogy, can be used to better understand Test Driven Development (and vice versa). 1

Experiences in using java on a software tool integration project

Building and integrating complex software development tools is a difficult task, but one which can result in great usability and productivity gains for software development. We describe our experiences in developing the Banquet set of integrated software development tools, initially using C++, and then Java as the tool interfacing and implementation and languages. We identify where, for us, the advantages of a Javabased approach lie. 1

Coordinating Distributed Software Development Projects with Integrated Process Modelling and Enactment Environments

Coordinating distributed software development projectsbecomes more difficult, as software becomes more complex, team sizes and organisational overheads increase,and software components are sourced from disparate places. We describe the development of a range of softwaretools to support coordination of such projects. Techniques we use include asynchronous and semi -synchronousediting, software process modelling and enactment, developer-specified coordination agents, and component-based tool integration

Inconsistency Management for Multiple-View Software Development Environments

Developers need tool support to help manage the wide range of inconsistencies that occur during software development. Such tools need to provide developers with ways to define, detect, record, present, interact with, monitor and resolve complex inconsistencies between different views of software artefacts, different developers and different phases of software development. This paper describes our experience with building complex multiple-view software development tools that support diverse inconsistency management facilities. We describe software architectures we have developed, user interface techniques used in our multiple-view development tools, and discuss the effectiveness of our approaches compared to other architectural and HCI techniques. Keywords: inconsistency management, multiple views, integrated software development environments, collaborative software development 1. Introduction Software developers work with a variety of specifications of software systems at differing ..