Test First

At ibuildings, we're currently in the progress of evaluating Extreme Programming (XP).

One of the key things in the XP philosophy is Test First. Back in the days when ibuildings was a group of about 6 merry hackers, we couldn't care less about formal testing. Now, having grown into a company with 25 people in two offices, and many customers and users of our software, it becomes essential.

ATK plays an important role in most of the software that ibuildings develops, so applying it to ATK is my starting point. It's too late now to do 'test first' on ATK. But it's not too late to just test, and to apply 'test first' to any future developments.

One of our interns is performing some research on several testing frameworks, such as PHPUnit. So far, SimpleTest seems the most promising.

I will soon have a look into how we can integrate this test framework in ATK, so we can perform automated testing before new releases, in the hope that we will have less new bugs. Such as the search bug that was introduced in ATK 5.1.

If you have experience with XP or formal testing, feel free to share your thoughts with us.