I’ve finally started writing about the work I did last year integrating HP Quality Center with JUnit (and with Bugzilla) and there seems to be some genuine interest in that, but as Elisabeth Hendrickson pointed out in tweet:

@fijiaaron I’m curious if, after your experience w/Junit+QC, you see this as generally beneficial, or just a way to clean up a legacy mess?

It’s really not a useful task, even if it was a challenging technical accomplishment and a capability with significant demand. The answer should be “don’t do that” — make the price of having repeatable, automated, continuous integration tests be “use good tools.”

Do you give them what they want or do you teach them the right way to do it? Does this crutch make the overall software testing practice better or worse? Tactically, it might make one organization suck less, but strategically, does it do more harm than good? Wouldn’t it be better to move to more lightweight (and user friendly) tools that make integration easier — and have a working process instead of tools enforcing policies to monitor?

The answer is, of course, yes. But the best case isn’t always what you’re given. If I were Robert Oppenheimer, I think I’d still build the bomb. More Junit + Quality Center integration information coming up (after I get settled in.)