Continuous Software Engineering and Unit Testing: From Theory to Practice

With the Agile development approach, the software industry has moved to a more flexible and continuous Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), which integrates the stages of development, delivery and deployment. This trend has exposed a tendency of increasing reliance on both unit testing and test automation for the fundamental quality-activities during the code development. To implement Continuous Software Engineering (CSE), it is vital to assure that unit-testing activities are an integral and well-defined part of a continuous process. This paper focuses on the initial role of actual testing – viewing unit testing as a quality indicator during the development life cycle. We review the definition of unit-testing from the CSE world, and describe a qualitative study in which we examined implementation of unit testing in three software companies that recently migrated to CSE methodology. The results from the qualitative study corroborate our argument that under the continues approach, quality-based development practices such as unit testing are of increasing importance, lacking common set of measurements and KPI's. A possible explanation to this may be the role of continuous practices as well as unit testing in the software engineering curriculum.