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InfoQ Homepage News GreenPepper aims to Improve Collaborative Testing

GreenPepper aims to Improve Collaborative Testing

Pyxis Technologies officially launched their testing product GreenPepper last July, at Agile2006.  Expanding on the kind of features offered by FitNesse, it is a platform intended to improve collaboration between business experts and software developers. Now, having taken the time to respond to feedback, Pyxis is offering a more complete product with their GreenPepper 1.1 Release.
We took the last 6 months to enhance the product based on comments, create the documentation, create an eclipse plugin to ease development, create a maven plugin, review our marketing message, etc. We released version 1.1 at the end of January. The next version is planned for the end of April and contains further polishing but also includes support for the .NET platform.
GreenPepper allows Agile teams to collaboratively write executable specifications, by enabling Story Driven Development across the team. One of the difficulties novices experience when doing this with Fitnesse is: how to organise their stories and tests. With GreenPepper, tracing requirements (stories) to executable specification documents (pages) is facilitated, allowing developers to focus more on the software and less on the requirements tool.  GreenPepper promises to deliver "optimal investment in documentation by easily turning it into executable tests."

One of the guiding principles of this product is the idea Ron Jeffries spoke about in his InfoQ interview: Running Tested Features
Our product allows teams to effectively implement the Agile principle of Working Software as the primary measure of progression and to easily track running tested features during iterations. For more details on the running tested features metric, have a look at Ron Jeffries' original article.
The commercial edition of GreenPepper offers tooling built on top of Atlassian Confluence, Atlassian Jira, Eclipse and Maven.



There are both free and commercial versions, and pricing for the GreenPepper Server is tiered, in four editions that allow for a different number of named users. Currently, GreenPepper supports applications developed in Java or Ruby. Pyxis invites continued feedback on their product, in order to create a toolset that reflects the needs of the development and business communities.

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