A common theme I read a lot about is the automation of testing. At the root this is wise move. Automate your testing. Then you can code up some changes, and retesting quickly by kicking off the tests. The big three places where automation can be used are unit, regression, and system acceptance tests.On our own project, most of the test phases are manual. Once in a while I will automate a unit test if I have the time. However we normally have no time in development. Everything is rush rush rush.
Let's step back a minute and define our testing. Unit tests is where small units of code are tested. Normally you write your test cases in the same language that the product is implemented in. You try to cover all the lines of code in your tests. There are popular frameworks which assist in this endeavor.
Regression tests are supposed to cover all the functionality in your product. This is difficult to achieve. There is not really a framework you can pick up to help with this. That is because the products themselves are very diverse. The regression tests themselves can check different characteristics of the system. This includes things like performance.
This one is getting long. So I will pick up with System Acceptance tests next time.
