JUC Session Blog Series: Andrew Phillips, JUC U.S. East

How to Optimize Automated Testing with Everyone's Favorite Butler

by Andrew Phillips, XebiaLabs

Andrew set the tone of the presentation with a key point stressing that Testing needs to be automated. The session brought out various implications and challenges in Test automation and looked at tooling in Test Automation.

The talk covered various aspects in Test Automation with the motivation to not just automate quality checks but analyze results, re-align tests to make them relevant and effective and map them to the core use-cases.

Test automation best practices were discussed for Parallelizing tests with orchestrated Jenkins pipelines and using ephemeral test agents, keeping the test jobs simple and self-contained within their test-data dependencies.

Andrew also covered the use of Jenkins to invoke test tools via plugins and scripts sourced from SCM.

Andrew addressed "Testing 101" (in today’s automation world) and walked through the shift-left paradigm in quality with the following aspects-

• Testers are developers

• Test code = production code

  • Conway’s law

  • Measure quality

• Link tests to use-cases

• Radical parallelization

  • • Fail faster...

    • Kill the nightlies

Then he covered Jenkins as the automation engine to orchestrate tests with the following well-known plugins:

• Multi-job

• Workflow

• Copy artifact

Making sense of scattered test results is still a challenge… There still isn’t enough tooling or a solution to give you a “quality OK” sense every time something changes -

• Many test tools for each test levels, no single place to validate if “this release” is good to go live!

• Traceability, requirement coverage

  • Minimize MTTR

  • Have I tested this enough

  • Support for failure analysis

We hope you enjoyed JUC U.S. East !

If you would like to learn more about this talk, here is the abstract for "How to Optimize Automated Testing with Everyone's Favorite Butler ".

And here are the slides and video .

If you would like to attend JUC, there is one date left! Register for JUC U.S. West, September 2-3 .