Comments on: 9 “Must-Have” Tools for Software Teams http://blog.bstpierre.org/must-have-tools-software-teams Software Development, version 3.0 Fri, 05 Mar 2010 15:01:53 -0700 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 hourly 1 By: Jesse Gibbs http://blog.bstpierre.org/must-have-tools-software-teams/comment-page-1#comment-6252 Jesse Gibbs Tue, 19 Jan 2010 13:46:02 +0000 http://blog.bstpierre.org/?p=254#comment-6252 Great list! I would add to it the need to have some form of comprehensive and maintained automated testing suite, consisting of unit and functional/UI tests. Having a suite of well-understood and well-maintained tests will give a development team confidence to make changes to the codebase, knowing that the impact of those changes will be known within minutes or hours. Integrating these tests into a continuous integration system makes them even more powerful. In practice, you can run a fast set of 'smoke tests' on every commit to provide fast feedback to a developer about the impact of recent changes, then run a more comprehensive set of tests on a nightly basis to verify code changes in the past 24 hours. Great list! I would add to it the need to have some form of comprehensive and maintained automated testing suite, consisting of unit and functional/UI tests.

Having a suite of well-understood and well-maintained tests will give a development team confidence to make changes to the codebase, knowing that the impact of those changes will be known within minutes or hours.

Integrating these tests into a continuous integration system makes them even more powerful. In practice, you can run a fast set of ’smoke tests’ on every commit to provide fast feedback to a developer about the impact of recent changes, then run a more comprehensive set of tests on a nightly basis to verify code changes in the past 24 hours.

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