Version control your automated tests

Alister Scott of the open source testing project Watir (pronounced "water") has published a short little how-to on getting your automated tests committed to Subversion.

Alister starts with the surprising observations that lots of testing organizations don't treat their automated test script as source code. I've seen this several places and others echoed it (along with their annoyance!) in the twitter conversation.

I think the reasons for this are mostly historical. For a long time the testers were treated as second class citizens and they had no alternative to develop their own practices apart from the development team. I think one of the benefits of the rise of Agile is increased collaboration between development and testers with (hopefully) and increase in respect for what testers bring to the table.

When Eric and I illustrated our observations on enterprise continuous integration maturity we saw the largest gap between current practices and recommended target in testing, and I think these lingering effects of tester exclusion is largely to blame. Without having your tests under source control you simply can't get the most our of them. But when you start treating them with due respect, which is to say like source code, you can start getting all the benefits of continuous integration that developers have come to expect with their unit tests.

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Posted by Jeffery Fredrick on August 7, 2009 6:01:00 PM EDT#