The version control tool recommended in Applied Software Project Management is Subversion, a free and open source version control system. It is available from http://subversion.tigris.org for many operating systems and platforms, including Linux, BSD, Solaris, BeOS, OS/2, Mac OS X and Windows. Subversion provides many advanced features for bringing source code under control, but it takes only a few basic commands for a programming team to use a simple version control repository effectively. Subversion can be downloaded from http://subversion.tigris.org. A free book about Subversion, Version Control with Subversion, is published by O'Reilly and available at http://svn-book.tigris.org.

The Subversion installation procedure does not install a graphical user interface—all functions are accessed through command-line programs. There are graphical utilities and web interfaces which work with Subversion, including TortoiseSVN, ViewCVS and SmartSVN.

There are many version control t

• CVS
  
• RCS
  
• Arch
  
• Aegis
  
• Perforce
  
• Visual SourceSafe
  

Unit Testing

The most common (and effective) way for programmers to do unit testing is to use a framework, a piece of software that automatically runs the tests and reports the results. A framework typically allows a programmer to write a set of test cases for each unit. Most frameworks provide an automated system for executing a suite of unit tests and reporting the results. This allows a full battery of unit tests to be executed automatically at any time with little or no effort. Unit testing frameworks are available for most modern programming languages.

Language	Framework Name (URL)
Java	JUnit (http://www.junit.org)
Visual Studio .NET	NUnit (http://www.nunit.org)
C	CUnit (http://cunit.sourceforge.net)
C++	CppUnit (http://cppunit.sourceforge.net)
SmallTalk	SUnit (http://sunit.sourceforge.net)
Perl	Test (http://search.cpan.org/~sburke/Test)
Python	PyUnit (http://pyunit.sourceforge.net)
Borland Delphi	DUnit (http://dunit.sourceforge.net)

Automated Build Tools

When projects become complex and require many steps to build, it’s easy for programmers to forget a step. A programmer may build a version of the software which is missing a library, or is compiled with incorrect options. What’s more, some programming teams have discovered that, as their build process becomes more and more complex, they have to dedicate more of a senior team member’s time generating new builds on a regular basis, which can cause delays in the project. Eventually it becomes difficult for the team to even generate a reproducible build. When the build is delivered to users, are often defects which can be traced back to missing libraries, or to required files which should have been included.

There are many automated build tools that address all of the problems caused by an unpredictable and difficult-to-reproduce build process. Popular ones include:

• Make (which ships with most Unix-like operating systems, and some IDEs)
• GNU Make
• Apache Ant
• Jam
  

Automated Project Monitoring

One of the most important ways a software project can be automated is with a development monitoring system. Two of the most popular ones are CruiseControl (http://cruisecontrol.sourceforge.net) and TinderBox (http://www.mozilla.org/projects/tinderbox), both of which are free and open source. These tools allow a project team to set up a set of tasks to be run automatically on a schedule. These tasks include:

• Retrieving the latest build from the version control system, building it, copying it to a folder, and reporting any build warnings or errors
• Running automated unit tests, generating a test report and reporting critical failures
• Running automated code review tools and reporting any warnings or rule violations
• Listing any changes which have been committed and by whom, including links to code listings for the changes
• E-mailing results as text or visual reports (or sent via SMS text messages or some other communications system)