Contributing to Eclipse: Principles, Patterns, and Plug-Ins

Chapter 15. Failed Tests Are Compile Errors

Now we come to what passes for a dramatic plot twist in the story of a software project. We thought of ten or twenty features we could add to our JUnit view: progress bars, hierarchical test suite browsers, and on and on. However, something was missing—rhythm. Intimately interleaving testing and programming has a whole different rhythm than programming for a while, then testing for a while. The difference is much the same as the difference between an incremental compiler that runs all the time and a batch compiler that takes long enough to drink a café macchiato.

*Bing,* the light bulb lit. What if failed tests were treated just like compile errors? Every time we make a change to the source, the tests ...