| It is typically important to be able to automate the build process as much as possible. This allows reference tree builds to be performed at night, saving developer time during the day. It also allows developers themselves to run builds on their own machines unattended. For software that is "in production," there are often many outstanding requests for builds of different versions of different products. For the person in charge of satisfying these requests , the ability to fire off several builds and "walk away" is often critical to maintaining sanity and satisfying requests. Automated testing presents its own issues. Many nongraphical applications can use simple scripting to manage the testing process. The GNU tool dejaGnu can also be used to test nongraphical utilities that require interaction. Of course, testing frameworks like JUnit (http://www.junit.org) also provide support for nongraphical unit testing. Testing of graphical applications presents special problems. For X11-based systems, I have successfully performed unattended, cron-based testing using the virtual frame buffer, Xvfb . On Windows, I have not found a satisfactory solution to unattended testing. All approaches rely on leaving the testing account logged in and the screen unlocked. | 