Continuous Testing

Continuous testing uses excess cycles on a developer's workstation to continuously run regression tests in the background, providing rapid feedback about test failures as source code is edited.

Continuous Testing

Continuous Testing

     

Continuous testing uses excess cycles on a developer's workstation to continuously run regression tests in the background, providing rapid feedback about test failures as source code is edited. It reduces the time and energy required to keep code well-tested, and prevents regression errors from persisting uncaught for long periods of time.

Quick Start

1) If you're using Eclipse 3.1, download v 1.2.1,
2) Continuous Testing 2.0 for Eclipse 3.2 is on the way
3) Join the mailing lists
4) Read the tutorial

Research - Overview A controlled experiment has shown that continuous testing has a statistically significant effect on developer success in completing a programming task, without affecting time worked. Developers using continuous testing were three times more likely to complete the task before the deadline than those without. Most participants found continuous testing to be useful and believed that it helped them write better code faster, and 90% would recommend the tool to others.

We have found experimental evidence that reducing the time between the introduction of an error and its discovery by a developer can lead to improvements in overall development time. This evidence is collected by high-resolution background monitoring of developer behavior, and analyzed using a model that infers the developer's beliefs and intent from their recorded actions. This model is then used to drive simulations of developer behavior and productivity in response to different environments, analyze the impact of changing the frequency of testing and prioritizing tests within a suite, and show that continuous testing promises even greater improvements.

The test suite in use by a developer may contain a test that covers a large fraction of the program code, or takes a long time to run. It may prove difficult for a continuous testing tool to provide early feedback when that test regresses, that is, when a change to the program being tested causes the test to stop passing and begin failing. To improve this situation, we are proposing test factoring. Test factoring, given a large test, produces one or more smaller tests. Each of these smaller tests is unlikely to fail unless the large test fails, and likely to regress when the large test regresses due to a particular kind of program change.

Click on the link to go to detail page: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/pag/continuoustesting/

     

Tutorials

  1. Eclipse Plunging/Testing
  2. Eclipse XPS
  3. DDchange
  4. GUIdancer
  5. GJTester - Java Unit Testing Tool
  6. Cantata++ - for testing C and C++ software
  7. CubicTest
  8. TTworkbench
  9. DevCreek
  10. What is Solex ?
  11. FITpro for Eclipse
  12. EclEmma
  13. Hitchhiker
  14. MockCentral
  15. CoViewDeveloper
  16. Alvicom JavaCov
  17. Parasoft Jtest
  18. JUnit Factory
  19. WindowTester Pro
  20. PETA-Designer
  21. Continuous Testing
  22. AppPerfect Unit Tester
  23. EclipsePro Test
  24. Web Performance Analyzer
  25. Web-CAT CxxTest Plug-in
  26. Cute C++ Unit Testing Easier
  27. Alvicom LoadManager