One of most important practices of TDD and XP is acceptance testing. This is the practice that closes the feedback loop on functionality and completeness. And yet this practice is also one of the hardest to implement. Indeed, most teams neglect this practice because they feel it's too difficult to achieve.

FitNesse is an open-source acceptance testing tool in the same way that JUnit is an open-source unit testing tool. Based on Ward Cunningham's FIT framework, FitNesse makes it easy for customers, business analysts, and testers to write and run acceptance tests, while also making it easy for programmers to bind those tests to the application.

This talk will describe the practice of acceptance testing, and provide a demonstration of FitNesse.

ROBERT C. MARTIN is President of Object Mentor Inc. Martin and his team of software consultants use Object-Oriented Design, Patterns, UML, Agile Methodologies, and eXtreme Programming with worldwide clients. He is the author of the best-selling book Designing Object-Oriented C++ Applications Using the Booch Method (Prentice Hall, 1995), Chief Editor of, Pattern Languages of Program Design 3 (Addison Wesley, 1997), Editor of, More C++ Gems (Cambridge, 1999), and co-author of XP in Practice, with James Newkirk (Addison-Wesley, 2001). He was Editor in Chief of the C++ Report from 1996 to 1999. He is a featured speaker at international conferences and trade shows.

His most recent books are the Jolt Award winning Agile Software Development, Principles, Patterns, and Practices and UML for Java Programmers.

Robert Martin will also be speaking on Design Principles, Design Patterns, and Agile Practices at the Rocky Mountain Software Symposium, May 21-23.