Testing is an important aspect of any software project. For backend software and components, this will typically comprise of automated tests, but also in a UI application it will involve manual testing and interaction with the UI.
In spite of how important it is, testing is often a neglected area of development because of how inefficient it seems. In a large system, you can spend a lot of time waiting for the application-under-test to restart with your fresh changes so that you can test them. The result is simply that we don't test as often as we should.
Eclipse in particular can suffer from this problem. In spite of the promise of dynamism that OSGi brings, Eclipse can make it difficult to restart particular components within a running Eclipse application - which means if you want to test changes to your plugin, you often need to completely restart Eclipse.
This presentation looks at techniques to improve the dynamism of a running Eclipse instance so that you can restart your plugin-under-development without restarting the whole instance. Combined with Bndtools' live coding and continuous testing features, this is a recipe for greatly improving the develop-deploy-test turnaround time - which in turn leads to shorter development times and higher quality code.