I just got back from the CITcon conference, which is the thrice-yearly confab of agile developers who use continuous integration (the “CIT” in the conference name). This was my second time at CITcon. It’s an open-space conference that is–surprise!–free, and chock-a-block full of good information. The principal reason it’s so informative is that anyone committed enough to CI to go to a conference has probably spent a lot of time thinking about how to solve problems of build and test at his/her site. And this concern and reflection on these issues is amply evident in the discussions in the hallways and the informal presentations.All the sessions I attended were thought-provoking. But probably the most interesting was a presentation by Andy Glover, the president of Stelligent, an agile consultancy. He runs a great blog in which has been touting a tool called easyb, which enables you to script unit tests so that they describe a scenario (rather than a code feature) and then test for the expected result. I’ve read Andy’s enthusiasm for easyb, but it wasn’t until I saw him demo it that I understood what the excitement was about. The key benefits are 1) you can show a non-programmer (like the manager who is expecting the software any day now) that you have written tests that match every one of his requirements–easyb enables you to do this by writing the test in near English language; 2) you can test at a slightly higher level than the unit test: rather than test tiny features individually, you can quite easily test a succession of conditions that are chained together. This approach is called–a little misleadingly,–behavior-driven development; which was an immediate turn off for me. I really don’t want to learn another x-driven development. I just want to do what I do better. And I think easyb might just be such a tool. So, don’t worry about the name, and hop over to the easyb website for a quick look-see. You’ll like what you find. Java