My employer, Stelligent, is hosting a roundtable discussion on TDD at our offices in Reston, Virginia called “TDD horror stories” on Tuesday, October 30th.

TDD, or Test-Driven Development, is a great companion topic to Continuous Integration as your integration is rarely useful without running a suite a automated developer tests.

It’s another wine (brought to you by Savoy-Lee wineries) and cheese party. Stelligent is also raffling off a an iPod shuffle

From TestEarly:

I often run into teams who attempted to jump skull first into TDD and eventually threw their bones up in frustration when either schedules became scary or they ran into scenarios too frightening to test. Are there areas where test-driven development gives you the spooks?

As you can see, it’ll be fun!

When: Tuesday, October 30th from 5:30 PM to 7 PM

Where: Stelligent’s haunted headquarters (map)

Who: Developers, Technical Leads, Architects, Project Managers, Testers…Anyone involved in software development

You must RSVP.

Steve Berczuk, Robert Cowhan, and Brad Appleton (Berczuk and Appleton are authors of the excellent book, Software Configuration Management Patterns) recently published an article called “Agile SCM is Testing” at CMCrossroads. In the article the authors clearly make the assertion that testing and SCM are not separate:

People care that their system works as expected, the functionality was added as desired and not removed accidentally. We want to ensure that the value of our configurations is increasing over time rather than decreasing! To verify these things you need to test the working application. In this sense you can’t fulfill the goals of SCM without testing.

Along with several other salient references, the authors point to our book on Continuous Integration: Improving Software Quality and Reducing Risk. In particular, they reference our advice on quality and policy metrics (note, much of this is in the “Continuous Inspection” chapter) as enablers to a more effective development ecosystem.

Over the last few months, I’ve become a fan of Hudson, an open source CI server that, in my opinion, is by far the easiest one on the market for configuring. What’s more, this CI server has a nice plug-in architecture that supports building in new features rather easily. In fact, a bit back I blogged about some challenges running Gant builds with Hudson and about a day later, there was a plug-in to handle it.

When I first started seriously evaluating Hudson, it seemed to only support CVS and Subversion. Recently, however, Hudson’s founder, Kohsuke Kawaguchi, reported that there are four additional systems supported (via the plug-in mechanism) including ClearCase, Perforce, and VSS.

What’s more, Hudson has a series of .NET plug-ins (like running NAnt, MSBuild, and even NUnit tests), making it an option for .NET developers looking to adopt CI.

If you haven’t taken a look at Hudson, you may want to– this CI server keeps getting better and better by the day.