“Working software over comprehensive documentation” means you do not need a functional spec… Wrong!!! It just means that you can iron out the wrinkles iteratively with the users – speaking as a vendor, you still need good documentation to assist with the QA and sign-off phases…
The best template I have found is: As a <user> I want to <do something> so that <I can accomplish goal>.
Unless you use pair programming extensively in your real-world development, I’d be very hesitant to use this. I’ve met any number of high-quality professional developers who have mentioned a strong aversion to pair programming and whose skill would not be well-judged in such a process.
Ward Cunningham writes on WardsWiki (referring to Kent Beck): I would often ask Kent, “What is the simplest thing we can program that will convince us we are on the right track?” Such stepping outside the difficulties at hand often led us to simpler and more compelling solutions. Kent dubbed this a Spike. I found … Read more
We run Buildbot – Trac at work. I haven’t used it too much since my codebase isn’t part of the release cycle yet. But we run the tests on different environments (OSX/Linux/Win) and it sends emails — and it’s written in Python.
There is actually a shunit2, an xUnit based unit test framework for Bourne based shell scripts. I haven’t used it myself, but it might be worth checking out. Similar questions have been asked before: Unit Testing for Shell Scripts Test Anything Protocol in Shell Scripts