Continuous Integration
The most amazing test suite ever written is useless if it sits on someone's laptop and is never executed! Having our tests in CI is not only beneficial to the quality of the application, but it is also beneficial to the quality of the test suite itself. By executing the test suite dozens of times a day we can discover test instabilities, which occur once in a while.
There are five components to setting up a Continuous Integration system. They are listed in order of importance here:
Test environment: In order to execute the tests, we need to have an application we are trying to test. Without a test environment, the tests are just pieces of code that cannot be executed. We talked about different types of test environments in the Data relevance versus data accessibility section of Chapter 4, Data-driven Testing.
Tip
Even if it is possible to execute a more complicated test suite than a smoke test in a production environment, it is an anti-pattern that should be avoided.
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