Introducing Automated Unit Testing into Open Source Projects

Abstract : To learn how to introduce automated unit testing into existing medium scale Open Source projects, a long-term field experiment was performed with the Open Source project FreeCol. Results indicate that (1) introducing testing is both beneficial to the project and feasible for an outside innovator, (2) testing can enhance communication between developers, (3) an active stance is important for engaging the project participants to fill a newly vacant position left by a withdrawal of the innovator.