The New South Wales Department of Lands has deployed tools to help facilitate the development and testing of its in-house Web services applications.

The Department of Lands oversees primary land management functions in NSW, including title registration; survey, mapping and valuation; the administration of crown land; and state parks and water quality.

The department's spatial architectures and integration services team leader, Lars Hansen, implemented Agitar's Agitator and Dashboard tools to "accelerate the development of bug-free coding", according to the company.

Hansen said the Agitator tool is used to test every line of code and the Agitar Dashboard allows developers to monitor the progress and quality of a suite of new programs being developed for internal Web services applications.

"While the use of Agitar has resulted in much more reliable code it has also made me a more defensive programmer, a better programmer," he said. "The other unexpected benefit is that we find we are enjoying faster program execution. This came as a nice surprise because I would have expected the opposite. Using Agitar, however, doesn't add to the code base."

Hansen said the programs put into production are not only likely to be free of problems down the track, but should also result in more efficient systems.

Other local Agitar users include EDS, Bankers Trust, the National Australia Bank, the NSW Roads and Traffic Authority, and Centrelink.

Agitar Software's Asia Pacific vice president, Jeff Pope, said the Department of Lands' focus was building new applications and on building quality in rather than getting the bugs out of completing code.

"Lands was spending a lot of time on code 'rework' and fixing bugs after applications went live," Pope said, adding since focusing on QA the department has developed a lot of bug-free code and applications build faster.

Agitar also announced this week the availability of AgitarOne, its new automated JUnit test generation suite.

AgitarOne features include automatic creation of regression test suites for legacy Java code bases, interactive unit testing, support for server-based deployments, and native support for continuous integration and testing using the open source CruiseControl.