Why Spend So Much Time on the Tools?

We focus on tools, ironically enough, because XP is a human-centric development philosophy. It recognizes that the key challenges of writing software are human challenges-such as getting people to work together, helping programmers learn, and managing emotions. Its four core values (communication, feedback, simplicity, and courage) are human values. Most tutorials published on XP so far have focused on the human issues: outlining the philosophy, spreading the ideology (Extreme Programming Explained was described by Kent Beck as a manifesto), and talking about the feeling of writing software. By doing so, Kent Beck and the originators of XP have followed their own philosophy: Solve the most pressing problems first. However, the current tutorials do not cover the technical details of implementing some of their practices. That's where tutorials like this one come in.

We will explain how to set up continuous integration and automated testing in a Java environment (specifically J2EE, although most of the tools apply generally). Technical detail will be addressed, and we will offer loads of examples to show the tools in action. Specifically, we will cover how to use Abbot, Ant, AntHill, Bugzilla, Cactus, CruiseControl, CVS, Eclipse, HttpUnit, Jemmy, jfcUnit, JMeter, JUnit, Maven, and other tools to write automated tests and achieve continuous integration.