What is 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.