ReFit: A Fit test maintenance plug-in for the Eclipse refactoring plug-in

The Fit framework is a widely established tool for automated acceptance test-driven development (ATDD). Fit stores the test specification separate from the test fixture code in an easily human readable and editable tabular form in HTML format. Additional tools like the FitPro plugin or FitN esse support the writing of test specifications and test fixtures from within the Eclipse IDE or the Web. With the increasing popularity of agile test-driven software development, maintenance of the evolving and growing test base has become an important issue. However, there has been no support yet for automated refactoring of Fit test cases. In a recent research project, we developed the Eclipse plugin ReFit for automated refactoring of Fit test cases. Fit test refactoring can occur due to changing requirements or changing Java code, which in either case means a cross-language refactoring to keep test specification and test fixture in sync. In this paper the concept for the development of the ReFit Eclipse Plugin is described, which significantly reduces the effort for Fit test maintenance and makes refactoring less error prone. Besides a tight integration into the existing Eclipse refactoring plugin, major goals of the plugin were to make it easy extensible for additional refactorings, new fixture types and further test specification file formats. Challenges faced when adding new and modifying existing Eclipse refactoring behavior are described and are due to the strong dependency on the Eclipse JDK and LTK features, and the solutions developed are presented.