Up to this point, our test development workflow has comprised writing test suites, adding them to a test driver page, and firing up the test page in a web browser on a development computer. However, test infrastructures can be used in far more scenarios than just manually running web reports. Examining the ensuing use cases, we will see how automatically running our test collection in arbitrary environments (for example, from a command line or build script, and possibly without a web browser) has enormous potential for the application development process.
In collaborative software development, problems can arise when engineers develop code separately that they later merge into a common code base. Unforeseen interactions between the changes can cause integration errors, breaking the overall application.
One mitigation approach for such errors is continuous integration, which relies extensively on automated testing. Continuous...