Before every commit you have to run all tests. Every new feature has to have a good test coverage. You should use Test Driven Develpment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test-driven_development) and Acceptance Test Driven Develpment. Acceptance Tests correspondence to user stories (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_story). They use TestBrowser sessions and reside inside the functional tests directory.
In an adhocracy.buildout you have bin/test. Alternatively you can call:
(adhocracy)$ bin/nosetests --with-pylons=src/adhocracy/test.ini src/adhocracy/adhocracy/tests``
(adhocracy)/src/adhocracy/$ ../../bin/nosetest -s adhocracy.tests.test_module
The -s option enables stdout, so you can use pdb/ipdb statements in your code.