Tech Watch | InfoWorld Staff » Test tool readied for agile development

November 26, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Test tool readied for agile development

TAGS: Application Development

ThoughtWorks Studios, the product arm of the ThoughtWorks software development consultancy, plans to offer a testing tool tuned to the agile and lean software development space.

Codenamed Tide and due in February, the product is unlike existing testing tools, which are built for testing at the end of the process, said Cyndi Mitchell, managing director for ThoughtWorks Studios. With Tide, ThoughtWorks is acknowledging that testing is done more frequently in the short iterations of development used in agile development processes.

"[With agile] testing is very much more at the center of the process. It plays in at the very beginning, it plays in at the middle and it's [important] in the maintenance of the system as well," Mitchell said.

Tide is a tool to do refactoring and restructuring of tests as software is being developed, she said. "It's for writing specifications, writing the tests for those specifications and writing the code that fulfills those specifications and being able keep the three of those in sync," Mitchell said.

Tide resides on top of the open source Selenium project, for functional testing. ThoughtWorks developed Selenium; ThoughtWorks Studios plans to expand Tide for use with other open source testing tools as well.

ThoughtWorks Studios currently offers Mingle, a tool for project management. Also on the agenda for ThoughtWorks Studios is a proprietary version of CruiseControl, for continuous software integration. The product will support large test suites and different software environments.

Posted by Paul Krill on November 26, 2007 12:16 PM

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