November 2016 Summaries

Teaching automated testing can be a daunting task, but it's essential for organizations to have high-quality automated testing. To engage students and make testing more enjoyable, teach using real-world systems, not toys, and demonstrate the value of testing by highlighting its ability to solve real problems. Instead of requiring testing, show how it can make a difference in the organization. Write tests that matter, focusing on specific functionality rather than testing every branch or input, as this slows down development. By taking a practical approach to teaching automated testing, organizations can improve the quality of their testing and create a more enjoyable experience for developers.

The author sets up a local development environment using Chef Development Kit (DK) version 0.15.15 to test a Chef cookbook, specifically the `chef-selenium` default recipe. They use ChefSpec, a unit testing framework for testing Chef cookbooks, to simulate the convergence of resources and prove that the cookbook code works correctly before pushing changes to production. The author writes tests for various scenarios, including installing and uninstalling packages on different platforms, and verifies that the tests pass using Rake. However, they note that the test coverage is not 100% due to missing tests in some recipes, and provide a snippet of code to enable test coverage for future improvements.

The text discusses the importance of end-to-end testing in DevOps environments, where virtual machines, continuous delivery, and microservices are prevalent. End-to-end testing is necessary to ensure that information is passed between components correctly and that the system's integrity is maintained. It provides benefits such as requirements validation, regression testing, and validation of environment configuration. The text also highlights the value of end-to-end testing for business-focused teams, who can use it to confirm system stability and meet customer expectations. While engineering teams may not find direct value in writing all-encompassing end-to-end tests, they benefit from unit tests that cover individual functionality. Ultimately, well-written and comprehensive end-to-end tests are a vital component of DevOps, providing confidence in the system's stability and integration with application components.

The holiday shopping season is approaching, bringing significant online sales and traffic spikes. With almost 50% of holiday shopping done online, mobile devices play a huge part in the mix. To ensure readiness, cross-browser and load testing are crucial to identify bugs, errors, and bottlenecks before Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Cross-browser testing is essential to expand coverage to as many browser/OS combinations as possible, while load testing simulates user behavior and traffic from multiple geo-locations to analyze performance and discover bottlenecks. By conducting these tests quickly and easily, retailers can avoid losing money and frustrated customers due to incompatibility issues or website crashes, and instead be prepared to handle the heavy holiday loads and traffic spikes.

Underestimating the impact of maintenance overhead can lead to costly surprises down the line. Running tests on a single device initially may not fully capture all the nuances and variations that can break a test, leading to rework and delays. Not leveraging full automation capabilities, such as continuous integration servers, can also hinder efficiency and productivity. Losing track of project status and communication among team members are common pitfalls that can derail even successful projects. It's essential to address these challenges early on to ensure the success of a test automation project. Effective maintenance planning, diverse testing on multiple devices, automation of repetitive tasks, regular project status updates, and efficient communication are all crucial to avoiding sabotage in test automation projects.