This report will focus on challenges we faced maintaining hundreds of builds that encompass tens of thousands of assertions. Over the past five years our development team, at Iowa Student Loan (ISL), leveraged TDD and Continuous Integration to develop software. Tests and builds quickly accumulate and maintaining them can be like herding cats. We were often tempted to neglect these tests in the pursuit of developing new functionality. We would like to share strategies that helped us maintain our automated test investments.

Automating your build process with Continuous Integration is certainly a great idea, but why stop there? Why not go the whole nine yards and automate the deployment process as well? Staging and production deployments are typically more complicated and more involved than a simple development deployment, but doing them by hand can be time-consuming, tricky and error-prone. Indeed, turning your staging and production deployments into a one-click affair has a lot going for it.