FatCow - Atlassian FatCow FAQ

What is Confluence?: Confluence is knowledge-management software designed to make it easy for a team to share information with each other, and with the world.

What is FatCow?: FatCow allows the user to simply write functional web testcases within a Confluence page. Tests are defined in a table and allow the user to perform functions like navigate to a url, assert values on a page, fill-in and submit forms and click links on a page.

Why is it called FatCow?: The name FatCow was arrived at after months of brainstorming and branding workshops and stands for Functional Acceptance Testing in COnfluence Wiki. FatCow is a little easier to remember.

How Does FatCow relate to FIT?: FIT is a Functional Integration Framework written by Ward Cunningham and others. We first saw FIT aftering looking at the Fitnesse Wiki and more interestingly the Web Acceptance Testing Tool (WATT) that is based on FIT and runs in Fitnesse. We were very impressed by how easy it was to define Web Acceptance tests and thought we could create something even better for Confluence. So FatCow is not FIT, thus is unFIT, hence Fat!

What is a Confluence Macro?: Macros in confluence provide in line fuctionality for creating or altering content on a Confluence page. Macros can be as simple as changing text colour or formatting a block of java code on the page to more advanced functions like generating complex content.

What is a Test Fixture?: A test fixture is an object the performs the actions defined in the FatCow test definition. The default FatCow Fixture uses HttpUnit to allow the user to navigate urls, query web pages and display the results in a test report.

Installation

How do I install FatCow?: FatCow comes pre-installed with Confluence. The source and binary distributions have been released here so that developers can use FatCow as an example for writing their own macros for Confluence.

How do I install a custom macro?

This feature will be available in the next version of Confluence 1.0b5

For now here's a simple 'experts guide', you'll need to add your JARs into the Confluence web application class path (ie in WEB-INF/lib will work) and then alter the confluence.macros file to add your macro classes.

How do I configure my own test fixtures?: Fixtures are configured in the fatcow-macro.properties , which can be found in the atlassian-fatcow jar. Users can include their own custom fixture in this file.