GTAC 2010: Git Bisect and Testing

Google Test Automation Conference 2010 October 28-29, 2010 "Git Bisect and Testing" Presented by Christian Couder. ABSTRACT "git bisect" is a command that is part of the Git distributed version control system. This command enables software users, developers and testers to easily find the commit that introduced a regression. This is done by performing a kind of binary search between a known good and a known bad commit. In the manual mode, at each step, a commit is checked out, and the user is asked to test the current state of the code. This can be automated with ""git bisect run"", so that a simple script or a command instead of the user can test the current state. Some developers out there are very happy with automated bisection, because it saves them a lot of time, it makes it easy and worthwhile for them to improve their test suite, and overall it efficiently improves software quality. "git bisect" makes test suites more useful and in turn test suites make it easier and simpler to use "git bisect". So using them together creates a virtuous circle. Another nice thing is that "git bisect" and test suites can be used together to reduce the number of tests that have to be performed while improving test coverage. In the end, bisecting can be an important part of a software quality process. "Christian Couder is a software engineer with 14 years of professional experience in software development, release, build and configuration management. He is a Git developer since June 2006 and he is working especially on "git bisect", an innovative tool to help find the changes that introduced a regression, since March 2007. Among many other improvements to "git bisect", he developed the "git bisect run" and "git bisect skip" sub commands. He also created the "git replace" command and improved many other git commands. Before that from 1999 to 2002 he was a KDevelop developer. His interests outside software development tools are mainly reading and taking care of his three children. He also blogs a little at: http://blog.couder.net Slides for this presentation are available at https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B4fT-BFGDnQkMDMxYTBjNTktYzQ0NC00NDViLWE0MzAtMmNmM2YyOTA5Y2Fi&sort=name&layout=list&pid=0B4fT-BFGDnQkYzVlMWY4M2EtYjRkYi00MDQ5LTg5ODUtNGQ4ZWU5N2NlMTRl&cindex=6