Chapter 12. Increasing the Effectiveness of Automated Testing

Shaun Smith and Gerard Meszaros

Copyright © 2003, Shaun M. Smith and Gerard Meszaros. All rights reserved.

This chapter describes techniques that can be used to reduce the execution time and maintenance cost of the automated regression test suites that are used to drive development in Extreme Programming (XP). They are important because developers are more likely to write and run tests, thus getting valuable feedback, if testing is as painless as possible. Test execution time can be reduced by using an in-memory database to eliminate the latency introduced by accessing a disk-based database or file system. This chapter also describes how the effort of test development can be reduced by using a framework that simplifies setup and teardown of text fixtures.