Automated Testing (CI)

Introduction
If you arent using automated tests with your Continuous Integration setup, youre really
missing out on something big. Believe meCI without automated tests is really just a small
improvement on automatically scheduled builds. Now dont get me wrong, if youre coming
from nothing, thats already a great step forwardbut you can do much better. In short, if
you are using Jenkins without any automated tests, you are not getting anywhere near as
much value out of your Continuous Integration infrastructure as you should.
One of the basic principles of Continuous Integration is that a build should be verifiable. You
have to be able to objectively determine whether a particular build is ready to proceed to the
next stage of the build process, and the most convenient way to do this is to use automated
tests. Without proper automated testing, you find yourself having to retain many build
artifacts and test them by hand, which is hardly in the spirit of Continuous Integration.
There are many ways you can integrate automated tests into your application. One of the
most efficient ways to write high quality tests is to write them first, using techniques such as
Test-Driven Development (TDD) or Behavior-Driven Development (BDD). In this approach,
commonly used in many Agile projects, the aim of your unit tests is to both clarify your
understanding of the codes behavior and to write an automated test that the code does indeed
implement this behavior. Focusing ...