Agile Development Practices 2007

Test automation is like exercise. We know both are great ideas, but most of us don't do much of either. Although we know that creating a solid automated test suite is critical to any agile testing strategy, we are often just told to "Do it" without much support-money or people. Jared Richardson examines the infrastructure and tools you need for your automated testing to succeed and prosper.

Since Martin Fowler completed his now-classic work Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code, few programming practices have been more effective-and more controversial-than refactoring. Refactoring is effective when you study and practice it diligently. It remains controversial because many development managers think developers should be adding features, not reworking old code. J.B.

Many who try to unit test their applications-whether using agile or traditional methods-quickly find that doing a thorough job can be difficult if the code was not designed with testability in mind. Roy Osherove describes dependency injection methods for designing APIs so that they are easier to test. He explains how design patterns can help and how to implement applications with interface-based programming. Roy shares his insight on what "evolving a design" really means in the context of test-driven development.

Many software teams do not have continuous visibility into the ongoing quality of their software releases. Although agile practices emphasize the value of bringing testing forward in the development process, many teams lack the infrastructure required to make this a reality. Testers often depend on development or operations to produce, install, or deploy builds. Zach Nies discusses how build automation provides an effective platform to bring quality and testing earlier into the development process.