Improve Agile Development with Inbuilt Unit Testing

Agile development methods let you do more in less time, but with short cycles you can't make mistakes. PDS for OpenEdge is designed to make sure you don't.

Agile development means short cycles and incremental deliverables. With shortened cycles, a developer cannot afford to introduce bugs and regressions into the code because each bug introduced into the system delays the entire process and increases cost—essentially nullifying the advantages of Agile development. 

Although one never intends to purposely introduce bugs, when working at a rapid pace how can your team be sure there aren't any issues in the new code or regressions in the existing code? This is where Unit tests comes in handy.

Test Your Changes Immediately

Unit tests help you test your changes immediately. They scope out any coding issues before they cause development delays, or are even completely missed. Now if you are using Progress Developer Studio (PDS) for OpenEdge for your Advanced Business Language (ABL) development, you have an inbuilt unit testing feature through which you can write Unit tests for your ABL code. ABLUnit is like any other unit testing tool, but it is tightly integrated with your development environment. Therefore, there is no need to introduce new tools or step out of the developer studio.

Let’s break it down.

Why Consider Unit Tests?

1. Better control of deliverables—Unit tests significantly speed up the whole development process by finding bugs early in the cycle
2. Fewer broken builds—All major issues found and fixed before check-ins
3. Error-free Code—Unit tests prove that your code actually works

Advantages of Unit Tests Using ABLUnit

1. Makes it all easy with tighter integration, a specialized perspective, project and a view which shows detailed results
2. Supports both Classes and Procedures
3. Includes a rich set of Assertions to validate the results
4. Can easily be integrated with ANT (build system)

Speed Up Development with ABLUnit

The rapid pace of doing business today has seen development teams turn more and more to Agile development efforts, but with OpenEdge you’ll be up for the challenge of short cycles. Unit testing is one of many powerful tools built right into Progress Developer Studio to help you develop your code more efficiently and with fewer problems.

To learn more and check out an end-to-end flow of ABLUnit, take a look at the whitepaper below. More information can also be found in our documentation.

Read the Whitepaper