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Book Excerpt: How to Improve your Continuous Testing

by Deborah Hartmann Preuss on Jul 30, 2007 |

Continuous Integration (CI) is a basic Extreme Programming practice, but it has also become widely accepted as an essential part of any competent software development activity. Developers talk about a good CI process (which includes a thorough test suite) as a "safety net" that allows them to try things on their local machines without fear of breaking the app upon final integration. But as time passes, the process can become slow, and when teams bog down they tend to abandon their CI best practices, undermining the value of this important code quality tool. InfoQ provides some advice and examples to create or improve CI test suites, in a Chapter excerpt, from a new CI book.

This chapter comes from the book Continuous Integration: Improving Software Quality and Reducing Risk by Paul Duvall, Steve Matyas and Andrew Glover. The authors aim to help teams make this important practice a "non event" - something that happens unobtrusively and as a matter of course, as opposed to the painfully long build times some teams experience. Long builds and inadequate test suites tend to lead to developer shortcuts and frequent "red" (broken) builds, at which point it's impossible to judge code quality based on CI results. The final result of this scenario tends to be quality-related delays to deployment.

To improve CI build times and test suite maintainability, read the InfoQ exclusive excerpt: Chapter 6: Continuous Testing from the book Continuous Integration: Improving Software Quality and Reducing Risk.