Tracking change and innovation in the enterprise software development community
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Agile communities consider stories “done” when the acceptance tests (also called story tests) are shown to the customer. Originally, this was a manual process, but in recent years, several frameworks have been created to automate this process, providing acceptance testing all the benefits of automated unit testing. One of the most popular of these if called FIT, created by Ward Cunningham.
Continuous Integration, a basic XP practice, has now become an accepted development best practice. InfoQ presents Chapter 6: Continuous Testing, with advice and examples for writing good tests to ensure system quality, from the book "Continuous Integration: Improving Software Quality and Reducing Risk," which aims help teams make CI a transparent "non-event".
In recent times, much excitement has circulated about the direction of "next generation functional testing" tools. Alas, many agile organizations still struggle to make their traditional record-and-playback automated testing tools work for them. Elisabeth Hendrickson, aka "test Obsessed", tells them why to stop.
Fixture Gallery is a new open doc cookbook by Gojko Adzic for FIT/FitNesse tests. It provides developers with a quick overview of the most important fixture types and concepts for agile acceptance testing using the FIT framework.
Gojko Adzic has recently announced the version 1.0 release of DbFit, his popular FIT/FitNesse extension used for practicing TDD on database code.
Peter Ritchie raised concern about TDD and BDD keeping practitioners from writing good unit tests. He cites an over-reliance on “interaction testing", a core mantra and essence of TDD and BDD, as a driver with tendency to result in incomplete unit testing.
Although both FIT and FitNesse are used for performing integration and acceptance testing on agile projects, people have tried to use these for general-purpose testing, with mixed results. Others have suggested that FIT should be used for tests where communicating with the business, or with a customer, is of paramount importance. Naresh Jain and James Shore have shared their experiences.
DbFit has had several releases in recent months, adding better support for Oracle, support for Java and MySQL 5, and embedding DbFit tables into Java and .NET code.
Continuous Integration has become a standard development best practice - but it's not always done well. Tests take up much of an application's build time, and poorly constructed test suites can cause long builds, whereupon teams start to circumvent agreed-upon CI practices just get the time to code. InfoQ presents advice and examples in Chapter 6: Continuous Testing from a new CI book.
