author: Sandra Drenthen
title: Towards Continuous Delivery in System Integration Projects
keywords: continuous delivery, test automation, case study, FitNesse
topics: Software Technology , Testing
committee: Mariƫlle Stoelinga ,
Christoph Bockisch ,
Rene Mulder
end: February 2014

Abstract

This thesis presents a strategy to introduce continuous delivery and test automation with FitNesse in system integration projects. It was designed for Everett's identity solutions projects, but is expected to be mostly applicable for other system integration projects as well.
The strategy consists of tools, tutorials, approaches and guidelines:* NetBeans, Git, Ant, JUnit, FitNesse and Jenkins were chosen as tools, used to achieve continuous delivery and test automation.* Tutorials were written for FitNesse, Jenkins and a solution to automatically push and pull to Git.* Several approaches and guidelines were chosen and tailored to Everett's projects and showed how to incorporate test driven development, how to decide which tests should be automated, how FitNesse and Jenkins needs to be configured and used, how to cope with test data changes and how to communicate with the system under test.
The strategy was constructed by first creating a high level strategy, which was then applied, evaluated, supplemented and improved during a case study at a client of Everett. During the case study, ten automated tests were made by the team-members of the project and the continuous delivery cycle was set up.
Evaluations were held with team-members of the case study project, which showed that the strategy did need some time investments in creating the strategy and tests, but can deliver an added value as it is expected to reduce faults, increase the quality, enhance trust from the client and possibly in the long run, also save time. However, in order to show this with hard facts and significance, the strategy should be applied once again where the strategy is complete in the beginning and more tests are written during the whole project.

Additional Resources

  1. The paper