As we mentioned in Part 1 of this series, the impetus for this series came about because I want to incorporate agile methods into the reporting modules of projects.  After reviewing the different practices that can be found in agile projects, the focus of this series is on how to create automated acceptance tests for the Crystal Reports part of your project. 

That first article showed how to write an automated acceptance test using the open source Fitnesse framework to write your tests.  The article went over why we might want automated acceptance tests for our reports, mentioning benefits like executable requirements and the ability to include your tests in your continuous integration builds.

Also in part 1, we had a brief overview of Fitnesse, and then showed how to write a test that would verify the layout of your report.  There are many parts of the format that can be tested using Fitnesse and crystal, and I feel this is the best place to include tests for continuous integration.

In the second part of this series, we are going to go over how to test the actual values of the report using automated acceptance tests.  Let's look into why we want to test values first.  

System Requirements

·         Crystal Reports .NET

·         Fitnesse

·         Visual Studio 2008