The inception of the Extreme Programming methodology has brought test-driven development and continuous integration into mainstream Java development practices. Applying these techniques to Java server-side development can quickly become a nightmare if you don't have the right tools. This article describes how to deal with continuous integration and how to use DbUnit in conjunction with JUnit to control the test environment end-to-end by setting up the state of the database before each test.

There are a lot of CM/ALM solutions out there - so where are we headed. In my opinion, the future of CM/ALM will be defined by the level of tool suite integration, more than by any other factor in the 3rd and 4th Generations of tools. And basic "integration" will not cut it. Putting tools together into a single package with some glue and triggers to help the tools interact is helpful, but will fall short of market demand. "Seamless Integration" will be a requirement. No advance is more important to the next genreation of CM tools. What about cost? What about ease-of-use? How about traceability?

Customizing or extending third party "vendor" source code is becoming increasingly common especially with the availability of open-source software. Building upon existing code increases your time to market and lets a group of experts elsewhere develop the foundation. Vendors typically provide frequent patches and new features in the form of vendor releases. Managing the incorporation of vendor releases alongside customizations requires an additional layer of configuration management. raditional branch-based software configuration management (SCM) tools require an unnecessarily complex branch and merge process. This article describes how stream-based SCM provides a more intuitive and efficient parallel development model for managing customizations to vendor code.

When inheriting an Ant build file to maintain, it is useful to get a feel for the flow and structure. Sketching the dependencies between targets is a useful way to do this. While it is time consuming to do so by hand, there are a number of tools to help.

Hudson is a popular web-based continuous integration server, written in Java. It allows you to automate your software build chain, e.g. monitoring changes in version control systems, triggering new builds, testing artifacts, sending notifications, deploying to production servers and much more.

With so many Continuous Integration (CI) servers to choose from, it can be difficult to decide which one is right for you. This article looks at a handful of open source CI servers, including Continuum, CruiseControl, and Luntbuild, using a consistent evaluation criteria and illustrative examples.

In this second part of a two-part series, you will learn about application security issues related to authentication and authorization, as well as five vulnerabilities commonly found in ASP.NET web-based applications. Additionally, find out how to keep configuration files from being unintentionally modified by uninformed programmers or administrators, as well as why it is critical to never rely on default setting values.

While Continuous Integration (CI) can be extremely effective at reducing risks on a project, it requires a greater emphasis on your day-to-day activities related to coding. In this installment of Automation for the people , automation expert Paul Duvall, lays out a series of CI anti-patterns, and more importantly, shows how to avoid them.

This article describes a new approach for managing software architectures. It uses inter-module dependencies to specify and manage the architecture of software applications. The technique, based on a matrix representation, is simple, intuitive, and appears to scale far better than the directed graph representations that are used currently. It enables specification and automatic enforcement of architectural intent such as layering and componentization. The article concludes by showing how this approach can be applied to a real application. We build a dependency model to represent the architecture of Ant, a popular Java build utility. We then examine how Ant’s architecture has evolved over several versions of the software.

Management Likes Integration, But Nothing Works As Advertised! That’s wrong with the concept of Integrated Tool Suites? This has been touted as the holy grail of CM for years – right? Almost all of the commercial vendors of CM tools offer integrated tool suites that do at least Version Control and Defect Tracking, and most do more. Most of the IDEs, including Eclipse and MS-Visual Studio just to mention two, offer integration with other tools. So again, what’s wrong with this concept?