Rob Smyth

Tuesday, 20 November 2007

Accelerating VS Build and Test Times

The latest CodeProject newsletter has an advert for a product that accelerates Visual Studio builds by using distributed computing. Cool. I wonder if it can be used to run the automated tests?

I expect that as a project proceeds the automated User Acceptance Tests (UATs) will take longer and longer. They currently take about 5 minutes in my current team. Even 5 minutes is an inhibitor, we do not always run all the UATs before committing. Especially for those who commit frequently (15-60 minutes). As they take longer this will affect productivity.

So ... can this tool, or another, use distributed computing to run the UATs? If so then perhaps they can run continuously with a dashboard showing current status. Stop typing and then watch them go green. Now that would be cool.

The product advertised is here.