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/
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