One of the Guiding Principles coming out of the caBIG Strategic Planning Working Group is:

• "All software products must be optimized for change rather than trying to get it perfect the first time out. The ability to easily adapt our software products to future changes and external influences is essential."

Using automated testing is a great way to enable flexibility while also maintaining quality, with especial benefits for small teams that do not have the capacity for exhaustive manual testing. As such, automated testing is a good best practice fit for caBIG.

You can automate (almost) any kind of software test, but first we'll concentrate on automated unit testing. Most people have heard of JUnit and many have even tried it out. However, taking full advantage of automated unit testing does not come naturally to most people, and can take months or years to master. That said, even beginners can obtain significant value from automated unit testing, and the only way to get better at it is to do it.

The BestPracticesSig hopes to engage the caBIG community in a discussion to determine how best to percolate out expertise in this area, because we believe that it will be of great help to teams building caBIG software. We want to be sensitive to the value of local decision making and approaches, while recognizing that there may be key areas like testing where teams can gain much from learning, adopting and adapting program-wide best practices. On the flip side, we know that there are existing teams already heavily involved in automated unit testing, and we would like to determine how best for these teams to share their expertise with others.

--MosesHohman

Resources

• http://www.junit.org
• List of automated testing software for many other languages