Jenkins: The Definitive Guide

Chapter 6. Automated Testing

Introduction

If you aren’t using automated tests with your Continuous Integration setup, you’re really missing out on something big. Believe me—CI without automated tests is really just a small improvement on automatically scheduled builds. Now don’t get me wrong, if you’re coming from nothing, that’s already a great step forward—but 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 code’s behavior and to write an automated test that the code does indeed implement this behavior. Focusing ...