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Drive quality earlier in the development process with continuous testing.
Large development organizations have increasingly been adopting select agile practices to enable faster development, create more reliable software, and reduce costs. Chief among these practices is providing developers early and frequent feedback from users, from other developers, and especially from the programming, build, and test tools. In the latter category, continuous integration and continuous testing are emerging as valuable techniques for identifying errors early so they can be corrected immediately by the developer who made the code changes. Most organizations that want to implement these practices face the challenge of scalability-how to implement continuous integration and testing for code bases that contain tens of millions of lines of code, involve many
teams of developers, or run on numerous targets and platforms. Electric Cloud specializes in tools purpose-built for projects of true enterprise scale. This white paper discusses ElectricCommander and how it uniquely delivers enterprise-level continuous integration with full support for all forms of continuous testing-without requiring modification to existing infrastructure, test tools, or established practices.
The Benefits of Early Defect Detection:
It is a well-established axiom in software development that the later a defect is detected, the more expensive it is to fix. Many sources claim, and many managers confirm, that the cost of remediation jumps exponentially as the software moves from one phase to the next: from requirements and design to coding, testing, and production. Research suggests the costs of defect repair are 1x during requirements and design, more than 10x during coding and testing, and 100x after release to production. These numbers,1 which are sometimes referred to as the 1-10-100 rule, probably understate the cost of fixing errors postproduction, because they do not reflect the unseen costs of lost productivity nor the lost sales resulting from customer-visible defects.
The high cost of defects is one of the main drivers of the agile development movement, which holds that development organizations should release frequently, solicit constant feedback, and easily accommodate changes initiated by bug discovery or modifications of
customer requirements. One of the key principles underlying this agile approach is "test early, test often."
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