Section 1.4. Organization of the Book

1.4. Organization of the Book

This book is centered on the use of the Fit framework for developing tests that nonprogrammers can read and write and that can be automated by developers. The rest of this book is organized into five parts.

Business-oriented Part I and Part II focus on the design of Fit tables, based on business rules. These parts are relevant to everyone who has an interest in using Fit, including programmers. Part III and Part IV focus on the development of fixtures that mediate between the Fit tables and the system under test, as well as the impact on that system. Part V focuses on custom development with Fit. These three parts contain technical material for programmers.

• Part I introduces the idea of Fit tables for testing and shows simple examples of several types of tests. We leave the more complex issues that arise in the design of Fit tables until Part II. This part requires no programming background.

• Part II shows by example how Fit tests are developed. We cover the issues that arise in the step-by-step integration of Fit tables for testing a "legacy"^[1] system in RentAPartySoftware, a fictitious software company. We now start looking at more complex issues that arise in the development of tests. This part requires no programming background.

  ^[1] By "legacy," we mean a system that lacks test support and hence lacks rejuvenation.

• Part III introduces the use of fixtures to mediate between the Fit tables of Part I and the system under test. We leave the issues that arise in adapting a system to enable testing until Part IV. This part is for those with a programming background.

• Part IV covers the development of fixtures corresponding to the tables introduced in Part II. We explain how to manage the changes to the system under test to enable testing. This part is for those with a programming background.

• Part V covers the development of custom Fit fixtures, runners, and test generators. This part is for those with a programming background.

The appendices are as follows.

• Appendix A provides access to background information on testing and other topics related to this book.

• Appendix B provides information on accessing the various resources related to this book.

• Appendix C briefly covers Fit and programming languages other than Java.