The key to improving the reliability of your software is to run tests whenever a change occurs. Continuous Testing leverages the practice of continuous integration (CI) to ensure highly reliable code.

You'll learn about various testing frameworks such as JUnit, Selenium, and DBUnit that can be incorporated into your CI system so that the tests are run continually (or periodically). Numerous examples will demonstrate the use of these tools so that you can immediately add continuous testing to your development infrastructure.

Increase feedback on your project by building your software with every change applied to your source code repository. The practice of Continuous Integration (CI) can be used to decrease the time between when a defect is introduced and when it is fixed.

You will learn how to get the CruiseControl CI server and a source code management repository to work together in a CI system. From a working reference implementation in Java, you will learn the attributes that make up an effective development platform for CI. Learn how to use the CI system as the centerpiece to your software development activities to create automated code reviews, generate diagrams and documentation, and detect anomalies on a continual basis. Paul will use CruiseControl, Subversion, Ant, JUnit, and other tools that can help you implement a powerful CI system.

Performing daily or continuous builds is essential for ensuring working software. Yet, most consider only the source, not the database, as a part of these builds. What’s good for the source code is also good for your database.

You’ll learn how to leverage your CI system to rebuild your database, along with the associated test data when changes occur. Examples will use the CruiseControl CI tool, Ant build tool and the MySQL database. You’ll see demonstrations for dropping and recreating a database along with its associated tables, inserting and modifying the test data.