Unit Testing for RPG
About
This page will not tell you what a unit test is or how test driven development works. There are numerous sites out there which explains that way better than I can. So please visit them first and then come back to learn how you can enhance your RPG skills with unit tests and make your life as a software developer a little easier.
Nice to have you back. Now that you know what unit testing is we can start learning how it can be applied to RPG. Fortunatly there is already a project which has done most of the things we try to accomplish. Take a look at the iRPGUnit project at GitHub.
Continuous Integration
It would be nice to know if someone on your dev team broke some peace of software with his latest changes on a program, either not compiling at all or not behaving as it should. This is where continuous integration servers jump in.
A continuous integration server lets you build part or all of your programs (as configured) and executes all configured unit tests. If somethings goes wrong you'll be notified via email.
Jenkins is a very good and open source integration and automation server. And did I mention that it is for free ;-) ?! It also runs on IBM i as it is written in Java. So no extra server is needed.