Question

We are working in a small team. We often had problems like developer1 did some changes in stored procedure or function and it affected work of developer2. Such issues are traced out by chance later. Please guide me how such issues can be stopped. Is there a free tool that we can run to test such issues?

Answer 1

Slowly introduce unit tests, focused integration tests and full system tests.

For all of those use a .net unit test framework to do it. It’ll be what you do in the test what makes it be any of the above scenarios. Make sure to keep each of those 3 type of tests separately, as those will have a big difference on the speed it takes to execute them.

For the unit test framework I suggest NUnit but there are others, one that I’ve found interesting but never made the jump is xUnit.net.

For full system tests I suggest to run them in the unit test framework using WatiN. You could also go with Selenium RC.

We often had problems like developer1 did some changes in stored procedure or function and it affected work of developer2. Such issues are traced out by chance later.

For that specific type of scenario I strongly suggest focused integration tests. Full system tests might catch such scenario, but it will still left you to figure out why it broke.

Instead focus the test in the very specific db access code that makes the call to the procedure. By adding scenarios in there that reveal all the expectations developer2 had from said procedure when (s)he wrote the related .net code, regression issues with that integration code can be revealed very quickly and be dealt with very effectively. Also note that developer1 can easily run the focused integration tests that involve that procedure or area of the database many times / which is a lot more likely to happen than doing the same with full system tests.