My Test Environment

WARNING: This blog entry was imported from my old blog on blogs.sun.com (which used different blogging software), so formatting and links may not be correct.

Last year I documented my setup for running unit tests on my Mac. The solution relied on a quirk of how the window system on the Mac worked. And unfortunately, when I upgraded to Snow Leopard a few months ago, the solution stopped working.

However, after trying a few things I've found a new setup which works -- and thanks to some other improvements I now have a better setup than ever!

In short,

• I run the unit tests via Hudson, the continuous integration server. The tests are running on a different account on this Mac, such that
  the UI tests never interfere with my work - no focus loss, no windows popping up, etc.
  
• I use a special Hudson plugin to filecopy my source tree to the build server repository, such that I don't have to check in the code I want to run tests again.
  
• Since Hudson is running locally it has access to my audio, so I have it speak when the build is done (and whether it succeeded or failed) so that I know immediately whether to push my changes or investigate the build or test failures.
  

The tri
AUDIO