What is Continuous Testing?

Continuous testing builds on the automated developer support in Eclipse to make it even easier to keep your Java code well-tested, if you have a JUnit test suite. With continuous testing enabled, as you edit your code, Eclipse runs your tests quietly in the background, and notifies you if any of them fail or cause errors. It is most useful in situations where you would already have a test suite while you are changing code: when performing maintenance, refactoring, or using test-first development.

Continuous testing builds on features of Eclipse with which you are already familiar:

• JUnit integration: Test suites run under continuous testing give you the same information, in the same format, that you already get from Eclipse's JUnit integration. However, continuous testing also helps to automate the choice of when to run tests, which tests to run, and in which order.
• Compile error notification: As soon as you write code that contains a compilation error, Eclipse highlights the error in the text and the margin, and creates a task in the Problems table. This makes it easy both to quickly find out if what you wrote was wrong, and to step through and fix problems in an orderly fashion. With continuous testing, you get the same kind of notification when you write or edit code that causes one of your tests to fail. However, test failures are different from compile errors in several ways: test failures can sometimes not easily be tracked to a single line of code, and test failures also can provide more information, such as a backtrace, than compile errors.

The continuous tester plug-in also adds functionality to JUnit:

• Test Filtering and Prioritization: By default, JUnit test suites always run in the same order. With the plug-in, you can specify how to order the tests and which tests should be run based on previous test results and which files have changed. New filters and prioritizers can also be easily created and added to Eclipse.
• Multiple Result Viewing: JUnit now stores the last result of every test run launch. You can select which result to view from a list in the JUnit view.