In this presentation about FIT, the presenter, David, takes a look at the meaning of the term ‘the build is broken’. What it is now compared to 10 years ago. He states that as technologists we should be proud that we’ve evolved the meaning from the literal code broke, won’t compile, to now a meaning saying that the tests are broken.
Given that in Eclipse, I’m told in almost realtime where compilation errors occur as I write them, and how this acheives high build success rate, I wonder if Eclipse can precompile and debug JUnit tests so that as we are changing code that is used in a test class, the test runs and the results are fed back in almost realtime, allowing us to pickup on even more potential hazards.
Lots of pitfalls for the cynical but its so crazy it just may work.