Just noticed this under one of the Build failure notification e-mails received from the TFS daemon:

 

- You are receiving this notification because of a subscription created by xxxx\Hadi Hariri Provided by Microsoft Visual Studio® Team System 2008 <http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/teamsystem/>

Notice there's no "If you do not wish to receive future notifications please....."

Nope, you're screwed. Your best bet is to not break the build...or break me!

Two teams work on two different components of a project. Team A works on component A, and to keep things simple, Team B works on component B. The system needs both components to function.

There's an additional catch. Team A needs component B to test A. Team B needs component A to test B.

So what to do? Well they would do what any good team would. Team A goes on holiday while Team B finishes and then Team B relaxes. Unfortunately that isn't always possible. 

Instead, they would use mocks, whether they create their own stubs/fakes or use an existing framework. To verify that component A works, Team A uses mocks to replace component B's functionality. Team B uses mocks to replace component A's functionality. All tests pass.

The next step would be to integrate the two subsystem and put it in production. I mean surely if all subsystem tests pass, it should work......the reality is it probably won't.

The moral of the story: Two halves don't necessarily make a whole. Don't skip your integration tests. It's not a waste of time. And integration tests aren't just about running all your unit tests on a continuous integration server. They are integration tests, not isolated unit tests.

Many know I've been a Finalbuilder fan from day one. Recently they came out with a server version of their product which allowed you to run builds unattended on some machine (different from automated builds based on Windows Scheduler). However, it still lacked some of the main features demanded by a proper Continuous Integration tool.

Well they've just released FB 6 along with the server version and I'm really impressed. Just look at the feature set here. I'm really desperate to try it out and the first thing I'm going to do is create continuous builds for Intraweb. I've been spending the past week cleaning up our build process and this will be the perfect opportunity to test out FB6. Great timing.