Martin Fowler has identified the key process elements of making Continuous Integration work. You could even argue that they are the elements that define Continuous Integration (done correctly). We include his list and our thoughts below:
Agile / Foundation series / Process Improvement / Software development / Test Automation / Testing
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Foundation Series: Continuous Integration
Continuous Integration is the software development and quality process where all team members merge their code and verifies it frequently – at least daily. This verification project includes both an automated build process and automated testing. The main benefits of continuous integration come from risk-reduction and cost-reduction.
Marketing / Software development / Test Automation / Testing
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Market Segmentation or Senseless Mistake?
A grass roots campaign has been started by Peter Provost to get Microsoft to include unit testing support included with all versions of Visual Studio 2005 (VS). Currently, Microsoft is only including it with Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) versions of VS. This looks to be a great example of a killer feature in a product providing so much surprise and delight that people are demanding that it be universally available. This is also a great example of market segmentation by Microsoft. The irony is that there is an open source alternative that makes the opportunity cost very low, and yet people are still clamoring. Let’s see why.
Process Improvement / Software development / Test Automation / Testing
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Learn to Fly with Software Process Automation
We can reach the next step in our software process evolution by automating much of our process. Flying squirrels evolved a technique* to quickly move from one tree to another without all the tedious climbing and dangerous running. Software teams that automate their processes achieve similar benefits. Automation allows us to increase efficiency while improving quality. And we spend less time on tedious and mundane tasks.
Foundation series / Software development / Test Automation / Testing
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Software testing series: Pairwise testing
Very large and complex systems can be very difficult and expensive to test. Often, we inherit legacy systems with multiple man-years of development effort already in place, in the field and of unknown quality. With these systems, there are frequently huge gaps in the requirements documentation. Pairwise testing provides a way to test these large, existing systems. And on many projects, we’re called in because there is a quality problem.
Software development / Test Automation / Testing
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Measuring the Cost of Quality: Software Testing Series
Should we test our software? Should we test it more?
The answer to the first question is almost invariably yes. The answer to the second question is usually “I don’t know.”
We write a lot about the importance of testing. We have several other posts in our series on software testing. How do we know when we should do more automated testing?
Process Improvement / Requirements / Software development / Software requirements specification / Test Automation / Testing / Use Cases / UX
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Software development process example
We’ve presented an example of the software development process across several posts over the last two weeks. In this post we tie them all together, showing the steps in process order.
Design / Process Improvement / Software development / Test Automation / Testing
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Software Testing Series: Organizing a Test Suite with Tags Part Three
This is the third in a three-part post about using tags as a means to organize an automated unit test suite.
Part 3 of this post can be read as a standalone article. If it were, it would be titled Design elements of an automated unit test framework using tags. If you’re only reading this post and not parts 1 and 2, pretend that this is the title.
Requirements / Requirements Models / Test Automation / Testing / Use Cases
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Sample Use Case Examples
We talked about informal use cases a while ago in our use case series. Over a series of posts, we are demonstrating the process of defining a software product. The next step, and subject of this post, is the creation of informal use cases to support the defined goals for the software.