Continuous Integration build tools are great: they help us ensure our product works after every commit, keep historical data and metrics, build our product for all target environments, and do many more useful things. But there's one key aspect that often gets overlooked: They're fun.

While there may be many ways to design a testing automation system, sqaMethods' goal has always been to deliver a solution that is easy, modular and where testers can create automation scripts that mimic the format of the manual test. This paper explains how we go about designing an automation system with the right level of abstraction and functionality.

It's impossible to pin down a universal definition of the term "change management," but what about at the business level? By incorporating executives and senior managers, key employees who are known for driving real change, perhaps we reach a more agreeable single definition.

One of the practices recommended by Extreme Programming (XP) is to keep a ten-minute build.  Kent Beck and Cynthia Andres write in Extreme Programming Explained (Second Edition): "Automatically build the whole system and run all of the tests in ten minutes.  A build that takes longer than ten minutes will be used much less often, missing the opportunity for feedback."

So what do you do when your build takes longer than ten minutes?