I was heavily involved with the Fit project for a while. (Fit is Ward Cunningham's predecessor to Cucumber. It used HTML tables rather than ASCII sentences.) I

I was heavily involved with the Fit project for a while. (Fit is Ward Cunningham's predecessor to Cucumber. It used HTML tables rather than ASCII sentences.) I find it interesting, if not surprising, that the Cucumber community is discovering exactly the same issues that we did with Fit: namely, that it encourages brittle integration tests, and that people don't use it for its intended purpose of collobaration. I've come to believe that these problems are unsolvable. I worked on and promoted Fit for several years. Eventually, after some deep soul searching, I concluded that Fit (and by extension, Cucumber) is solving the wrong problem. The value of Fit (and Cucumber) comes from discussions with domain experts. The tools encourage a certain amount of rigor, which is good, but you can get that rigor just as easily by discussing concrete examples at a whiteboard. The actual automation of those examples, which is where Fit and Cucumber focus your attention, has minimal value. In some cases, the tools have negative value. Their tests are fundamentally more complex and less refactorable than ordinary xUnit tests. If you want to automate the examples, you're better off doing it in a programmer tool. Some people got a lot of value out of Fit, and I'm sure the same is true for Cucumber. They got that value by using it for collaboration and focusing on domain rules rather than end-to-end scenarios. My experience, though, was that the vast majority used it poorly. When a tool is used so badly, so widely, you have to start questioning whether the problem is in the tool itself. Ward and I ended up retiring Fit [1]. I've written about my reasons for abandoning it before [2] [3]. [1] http://www.hanselminutes.com/151/fit-is-dead-long-live-fitnesse-with-ward-cunningham-and-james-shore http://www.hanselminutes.com/151/fit-is-dead-long-live-fitne... [2] http://www.jamesshore.com/Blog/The-Problems-With-Acceptance-Testing.html http://www.jamesshore.com/Blog/The-Problems-With-Acceptance-... [3] http://www.jamesshore.com/Blog/Acceptance-Testing-Revisited.html http://www.jamesshore.com/Blog/Acceptance-Testing-Revisited....