I haven’t been blogging for some time now. I’m getting back to blogging by announcing my new book on TDD (Test-Driven Development), Build Automation and Continuous Integration.

The title is indeed, “Test-Driven Development, Build Automation, Continuous Integration
(with Java, Eclipse and friends)” and can be bought from https://leanpub.com/tdd-buildautomation-ci.

The main goal of the book is to get you started with Test-Driven Development (write tests before the code), Build Automation (make the overall process of compilation and testing automatic with Maven) and Continuous Integration (commit changes and a server will perform the whole build of your code). Using Java, Eclipse and their ecosystems.

The main subject of this book is software testing. The main premise is that testing is a crucial part of software development. You need to make sure that the software you write behaves correctly. You can manually test your software. However, manual tests require lots of manual work and it is error prone.

On the contrary, this book focuses on automated tests, which can be done at several levels. In the book we will see a few types of tests, starting from those that test a single component in isolation to those that test the entire application. We will also deal with tests in the presence of a database and with tests that verify the correct behavior of the graphical user interface.

In particular, we will describe and apply the Test-Driven Development methodology, writing tests before the actual code.

Throughout the book we will use Java as the main programming language. We use Eclipse as the IDE. Both Java and Eclipse have a huge ecosystem of “friends”, that is, frameworks, tools and plugins. Many of them are related to automated tests and perfectly fit the goals of the book. We will use JUnit throughout the book as the main Java testing framework.

it is also important to be able to completely automate the build process. In fact, another relevant subject of the book is Build Automation. We will use one of the mainstream tools for build automation in the Java world, Maven.

We will use Git as the Version Control System and GitHub as the hosting service for our Git repositories. We will then connect our code hosted on GitHub with a cloud platform for Continuous Integration. In particular, we will use Travis CI. With the Continuous Integration process, we will implement a workflow where each time we commit a change in our Git repository, the CI server will automatically run the automated build process, compiling all the code, running all the tests and possibly create additional reports concerning the quality of our code and of our tests.

The code quality of tests can be measured in terms of a few metrics using code coverage and mutation testing. Other metrics are based on static analysis mechanisms, inspecting the code in search of bugs, code smells and vulnerabilities. For such a static analysis we will use SonarQube and its free cloud version SonarCloud.

When we need our application to connect to a service like a database, we will use Docker a virtualization program, based on containers, that is much more lightweight than standard virtual machines. Docker will allow us to

configure the needed services in advance, once and for all, so that the services running in the containers will take part in the reproducibility of the whole build infrastructure. The same configuration of the services will be used in our development environment, during build automation and in the CI server.

Most of the chapters have a “tutorial” nature. Besides a few general explanations of the main concepts, the chapters will show lots of code. It should be straightforward to follow the chapters and write the code to reproduce the examples. All the sources of the examples are available on GitHub.

The main goal of the book is to give the basic concepts of the techniques and tools for testing, build automation and continuous integration. Of course, the descriptions of these concepts you find in this book are far from being exhaustive. However, you should get enough information to get started with all the presented techniques and tools.

I hope you enjoy the book 🙂