A brief explanation about how to write acceptance test with Fitnesse, using a fixture for RESTful APIs.

1. Writing Acceptance Tests Using Fitnesse
Facundo Farias
facundo.farias@gmail.com

2. Agenda
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Acceptance Testing
Acceptance Tests
How To: Acceptance tests
FitNesse and RESTful Web Services
Samples
How does Acceptance Test fit in our process?

3. Acceptance Testing
• Acceptance Testing is a high-level testing procedure
used to verify that a software system behaves as
specified by customer.
• The term Acceptance Testing itself is strongly related to
the agile software development method Extreme
Programming (XP).

4. Acceptance Tests by definition
• Acceptance tests are created from user stories. During an
iteration the user stories selected during the iteration
planning meeting will be translated into acceptance tests.
The customer specifies scenarios to test when a user story
has been correctly implemented. A story can have one or
many acceptance tests, what ever it takes to ensure the
functionality works.
• Acceptance tests are black box system tests.
• Each acceptance test represents some expected result from
the system.
• A user story is not considered complete until it has passed its
acceptance tests.
• Acceptance tests should be automated so they can be run
often.

5. Benefits of Acceptance Tests
Some of the benefits using Acceptance Tests:
1. Helps to clarify requirements,
2. Tests are written using customer language,
3. Shows working software in a real environment,
4. Increase communication within the team,
5. Can be considered as an absolute criteria for deciding
when a feature is complete,
6. Eliminates ambiguity from users stories,
7. Can be seen as a partial replacement for
documentation.

6. Many tools to implement it
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Fitnesse
Cucumber
Concordion
Selenium
GreenPepper
Jbehave
Others

7. Which one should I use?
• It depends on:
1. The Programming Language
2. The Development Infrastructure and Tools,
3. The OS

8. We did a choice: Fitnesse for REST
• After a brief analysis of each tool, and an small PoC, we
found Fitnesse the best tool for our project. Why:
1. The tests are written in a wiki format,
2. The implementation was very easy,
3. We didn’t need to touch anything in our code, since with a single
table we can write complex tests,
4. Fitnesse exposes a REST interface to run the tests in a suite
automatically returning XML results,
5. The received XML can be transformed using an XSLT file to
convert the results to JUnit format, in this way, it will be integrated
to Bamboo,
6. It has a big community in the Open Source world.

9. FitNesse & RESTful Web Services
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One thing that acceptance testing can perform very well is the validation of
RESTful web services, but unfortunately FitNesse does not provide native
support for testing RESTful web services. Fortunately if you search the
Internet you'll quickly find a custom fixture called RestFixture that does most
of what you will need to test your web services. In
short, the RestFixture allows you to execute various HTTP verbs against a
service, passing the appropriate data, and then validate the results.
The RestRixture is an ActionFixture, therefore all
the ActionFixture goodies are available. On top of that it contains the
following 7 methods:
header: to be able to set the headers for the next request (a CRLF
separated list of name:value pairs),
body: to allow request body input, essential for PUT and POST,
let: to allow data from the response headers and body to be extracted and
assigned to a label that can then be passed around.
GET, POST, PUT, DELETE to execute requests.

10. Getting started with RestFixture
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Each test is a row on a RestFixture table and it has the following format:
• |VERB|uri|?ret|?headers|?body|
• VERB is one of GET, POST, PUT, DELETE
• uri is the resource URI
• ?ret is the expected return code of the request. it can be expressed as a
regular expression, that is you can write 2dd if you expect any code
between 200 and 299.
• ?headers is the expected list of headers. In fact, the expectation is checked
by verifying that *all* the headers in here are present in the response. Each
header must go in a newline and both name and value can be expressed as
regular expressions to match in order to verify inclusion.
• ?body it's the expected body in the response. This is expressed as a list of
XPath expressions to allow greater flexibility.

11. GET sample

12. GET sample result

13. POST sample

14. POST sample result

15. PUT sample

16. PUT sample result

17. DELETE sample

18. DELETE sample result

19. How are we using it?
• We’ve implemented FitNesse with this specific
RestFixture to validate the our REST interfaces.
• We have a suite for the interfaces already
developed, called Regression. This suite will be
executed as an smoke test after each code
commit, since it tests the sunny day of each API e2e.
• We have another suite, to test the Current sprint. This
should be RED at the very beginning of the sprint, but
should start be GREEN when the sprint is reaching the
end.
• Both test suites can be executed thru a Bamboo Plan.
The first stage (Regression) will run always, and the
second stage (Current) will be optional (we choose
when to run it).

20. References
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Acceptance Tests [extremeprogramming.org]
Test Driven .NET Development with FitNesse
Acceptance Testing [University of Helsinki]
FitNesse Web Page
Fit: Framework for Integrated Test
RestFixture: Validation of RESTful Web Services
ResFixture Documentation Tests

21. Q&A
Thanks!