Integration Testing Framework

The design and development of took almost 3 months for a team of 5 people, working in parallel and absolutely distributed (they never met each other face-to-face and never communicated online). There were engineers from Poland, Belarus, Czech Republic, and United States. The team communicated only through Trac and Subversion, using FaZend.com Continuous Integration platform.

The product is developed in PHP, with an extensive use of XML and JavaScript. We've used a number of frameworks and third-party tools, like PHPUnit, jQuery, JSLint, QUnit, Phing.

The biggest challenge in the project was a necessity to invent the product, design it and develop at the same time. There were a number of risks related to this challenge. What helped us to mitigate the majority of risks is a Puzzle Driven Development concept, which was invented during that time and applied for USPTO patent. The project helped us to invent the PDD concept and to prove its effectiveness in a distributed team doing parallel programming.