Selenium Grid on Docker and Vagrant: Part 2

Last time we got Vagrant configured to run a single VM with three docker containers: a Selenium Grid hub, a Chrome node, and a Firefox node. This is a good start, but I wanted to configure a Selendroid node to round out the browser selection. That’s when things got a little… messy. So upon investigation into how the Docker images I was already using were constructed, I discovered a few key points: Continue reading

Selenium Grid on Docker and Vagrant: Part 1

I’ve been putting together a quick proof-of-concept here at work about how we could use Docker to run a Selenium Grid. I’m not sure we’ll go that route, but I was curious how it could be done. One of the main advantages of doing this sort of rough proof in Vagrant is that it becomes very portable. At the end of the day, I have a mini testing cloud I can run my tests against — and any member of my team can check out a few files and have their own mini testing cloud. Continue reading

CI with Jenkins for Javascript: Part 3: Scheduling and reporting

In Part One, we set up a Jenkins server and some unit testing. In Part Two, we added some static analysis tools to our build. But we’re still manually running all this, even if it’s all tied together now. Let’s talk about some of the features Jenkins brings to the table. Building automatically Our code release pipeline is going through some revisions to make better use of branching, so I have the good fortune of being able to detail for you two different build strategies for two different types of branching strategies. Continue reading

CI with Jenkins for Javascript: Part 2: Static Analysis

Part one So. We’re up, we’re unit testing, we’re publishing results. But unit testing is only as good as the tests themselves, and that depends heavily on the programmers’ ability to write good tests. Maybe we want more than that. Maybe we want a metric that isn’t essentially self-reported. Maybe we want static analysis. What is Static Analysis Static Analysis is a category of testing techniques that covers any metric of code that can be collected without executing the code. Continue reading

CI with Jenkins for Javascript: Part 1: Unit Testing

In a lot of ways, the Javascript world feels like it’s trapped in the year 2k: the dot com bubble is swelling huge, and nobody has time for best practices, it’s time to reinvent everything and strike it rich. As an SQA professional, it’s immensely frustrating to outline a technique and be told “Javascript doesn’t do that.” (That’s one of three answers that ought to be banned from a webdev’s vocabulary; the other two are “I think jQuery does that” and “Maybe with Node? Continue reading

Introducing: Terminus

So in my “Introducing: Agni” series, I explained the process I went through to get a used machine from Goodwill up and running to replace my previous living room server, Mercury, which exploded. I realize I left a loose end — I had to restore the mysql database from a several years old backup that I’d taken before I started backing up to the backup drive that died, and we just reconstructed the data after that point. Continue reading

Agni Lives!

So there’s this giant cloud hovering over Agni, and its name is Mysql. Since I had the hard drive from mercury mounted instead of booting from it, I decided to just copy over the “live” database files instead of doing a dump and restore. I then went to bed. When I woke up, I saw increasing numbers of I/O errors followed by the end of the operation failing. Oops. I go to try again… and the drive can’t be read. Continue reading