Porting Jenkins logs to Newrelic

Greetings, world. It’s been a while, hasn’t it? It’s not as though I haven’t had interesting technical problems to blog about in the past few years, only that my previous job had kept me so busy I didn’t have the time or energy to write up the problems I solved. But as of last December I started another new job, and I now have the time I need to really reflect and write up the things I’m learning. Continue reading

Quick Tip: passing parameters from Jenkins to Maven

I saw bits and pieces of information all over the internet about parameters and properties and command-line arguments, but what I was looking for I didn’t find: a simple, straightforward explanation of how to use a Paramaterized Build in Jenkins to pass arguments through to the jUnit tests that run the functional tests that I’ve built on Webdriver. So: here it is! Step 1: Command-line via Maven to jUnit Use the System. 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