How to guarantee the stability of your software

Imagine that you hire a handy man to install a new roof lamp in your living room. After he finishes his work he will try to switch on and off the new lamp to see if the lamp is working correctly.  This is the exact same thing a developer will usually do, he will just test the feature he just added, and if it works fine, then he will move on to the next feature to develop.

Talking back about our handy man, there is just one little detail he forgot: after the installation of the lamp is done, he should have tested all the electrical system of the house to be sure that what he just did, don’t mess up other lamps or electric plugs of the house.  If not, how can he be sure that he didn´t move an old cable disconnecting something?

The insertion of bugs when adding new code is a common problem that you can face if you are doing continuous integration.  The only way to avoid this is by doing automated testing, and if you want to apply Agile methodologies this is mandatory.

As we build only web applications, we only build tests to interact with the user interface via a Web browser. In the next posts of our blog we will give you examples of how to:

1.     Develop test cases using the Selenium WebDriver

2.     Run your test cases using Ant

3.     Use Hudson to schedule a daily execution of Ant (therefore your test cases)

The tools that you will need to perform this are:

Eclipse IDE For Java EE Developers

http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/packages/eclipse-ide-java-ee-developers/indigosr2

Ant

http://ant.apache.org/bindownload.cgi

Selenium WebDriver

http://www.seleniumhq.org/download/

Hudson

http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/download.php?file=/hudson/war/hudson-3.1.1-RC1.war

See you in a couple of days J