Fitnesse and enormous amount of files in VCS - practical approach?

Question

We (start to) use FitNesse for our UI tests.

We know how to put it under version control. I even checked Uncle Bob's tutorial video.

The problem we see is that the (very basic) tests we have added so far amount to (already cleaned) over 5,000 files in over 2,500 directories in the FitnesseRoot (all the content.txt and properties.xml files).

We see this amount of files (nearing our amount of source files, and growing) as problematic, as the humans managing those files will have to deal with an ever increasing deep and broad directory tree with relatively little content per directory/file.

We follow a gitflow like approach with several active versions, and blowing up the amount of files present doesn't seem to be the best of ideas, although I trust the VCS tool itself won't have any problem with it, moving files between version will possibly be awkward when they then number in the 10,000's.

So, the question really:

• First, would you see this as a problem, and if not, why?
• Is there an alternative (mergable) representation for a FitNesse suite that doesn't use so many files+folders?

Note: Specific VCS in use intentionally left unspecified.

Answer 1

Yes, it is a problem and one of the biggest weaknesses of FitNesse IMO. Dealing with 1000's of files all named content.txt can add friction that could have been avoided if they were just named PageName.txt. I don't have a real good solution. On smaller projects it hasn't been too much of an issue. On some larger projects I've not used the FitNesse wiki and maintained tests in HTML files with other editing tools. Adding an alternative file management plug-in to the FitNesse code base would be possible (but certainly not trivial!) but it's not high on my job list right now.