“Is Fit Dead?” Conversation Summary
March 15, 2009
Eric Lefevre-Ardant has an excellent transcript of a discussion about Fit that I participated in on Twitter a few weeks ago. Here's an excerpt:
It was kicked off by an interview of Ward Cunningham and James Shore on Hanselminutes where Ward & James were asked whether Fit was dead.
Bob Martin first reacted on Twitter by pointing out that, at any rate, “FitNesse is thriving”, along with Slim, a new system that can be used by Fitnesse as an engine to run the test tables.
Michael Feathers replied that, in his view, Fit was more appropriate as a seed for other works: “Take it, grow it locally, and never commit back.” This seems confirmed by James Shore, a former leader of the Fit project (and a successor to Ward in that role): “Fit core was intentionally resistant to change [...] from an organizational perspective”
Interestingly, James believes that both Fit and Fitnesse have “similar flaws, which could be solved by another approach”:
- “Fit flaw #1: maintenance. HTML is hard to maintain and refactor.”
- “Fit flaw #2: Customers. Customers don’t generate the documents, and that was the whole idea.”
- “Fit flaw #3: Programmers. Fit loves domain models and Whole Value. Most programmers don’t. Impedance mismatch.”
If you're interested in Fit, FitNesse, or similar tools, it's well worth the read.