Apart from the obvious unit testing code which could be fun trying to convince a team to use. There are things known as ‘Continuous Integration’ processes and servers. The basic idea is to continually build and test your product automatically and report on successful and failed builds.
I’ve known about this methodology for long time now but I’ve never bothered to install a CI server since it was always for myself. In the past a loop in a shell script running make and or make test usually did the trick. Then I discovered gitbuilder which is just a small set of scripts for automating the process. Today I have Jenkins installed and I’m somewhat looking at buildbot as well.
Jenkins appears to be the most responsive and feature rich of the three systems that I have played with. Buildbot looks lightweight and scalable. Though I do miss the git bisect and build on a failure that gitbuilder provides.
Having to work with a team that is geographically distributed sometimes makes idea exchanges, organising events and development difficult. Any tool that I can get my hands on to encourage collaborative work and discussion is going to be used.
Automating the build and test process also means that it is possible to automate the release process. If all the ‘tests’ pass then why not release it? I will need to look at integrating things with fitnesse next. Other benefits from using a CI process or server means that most if not all things get automated, this turns into a highly valuable source of documentation for incoming developers and engineers. Documentation often gets left to the end instead of being done on a continual basis as the project progresses.
Hopefully the CI server won’t be used to name and shame developers in the group, it’s there to make sure everything is working as expected.
Now to convince the team that building early and continually is actually a good idea! Having somewhat successfully kicked off some pairing sessions with various team members is good, but being more flexible and professional about what we are building is what I’m after.