My love and hatred of Fitnesse

I honestly can't remember how I survived without Fitnesse. What a marvelous tool!

Fitnesse provides regression and intergration testing of our backend api, acceptance testing that is clearly understandable to non-programmers (even managers can understand it) and specs for developers. It allows us to put our datastores into a known state before tests run without having to expose the functionality through the api. Truly, exactly what the doctor ordered.

But there's a dark side to Fitnesse too. And it goes beyond the fact that, as a wiki, it's easy to get a big mess of tests with very little organization. After using Fitnesse for over 2 years, we've been able to rangle in the mess and figure out a good organizational strategy.

The biggest problem we're facing now is a limited number of people that can write quality tests. In fact, the only one who puts any serious time into writing tests is . . . me! Sure our project manager spends time putting in user stories, but these are little more than "items should be able to be deleted" type entries. The act of converting that into actual executable tables falls on my shoulders.

Perhaps it's because I'm too controlling, or perhaps it's because I know that having quality tests ready to go means that the team will always have well defined work to complete. I wonder if I should try offloading some of the testing onto other developers (the only ones who have any chance of creating quality tests), or if I should keep them working on making the tests pass.