Agile Trailblazers Blog

There is a trend today that I find troubling: non-technical release train engineers, Agile coaches, or others in Agile leadership roles who are non-technical, leading the way for Agile ceremony planning without including technical thought leaders who know the technical side of Agile (which today is CI/CD).

Technical practices are the backbone of Agile. It is the technical practices that make Agile possible. If you don’t center discussions around technical enabling practices, you are wasting your time.

Don’t get me wrong: there are non-technical things about Agile. Things like a Lean Portfolio, retrospective, and backlog grooming. But if you want to improve those processes, you have to include a discussion of the technical enablers that make improvement possible.

Applications running in production, test, and development environments produce massive files filled with endless lines of text in the form of log files. Mining the data available in these files manually is a daunting, nearly impossible, effort. This is where log management tools come into play. The two most popular are Splunk and the Elastic Stack. Both solutions are excellent options, with each having their own pros and cons; this article makes no claims as to which tool is best for your organization, as there are simply too many variables to be taken into consideration to make a blanket statement of one being better than the other.

Cucumber, Selenium and Gherkin have become popular tools for helping teams implement test automation or what is often referred to as Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD) or Behavior Driven Development (BDD). By running your tests locally, you can ensure your application runs as expected on your OS/Browser setup, but to truly know that the app works on other configurations, you need a way to emulate numerous environments. SauceLabs is a web service that you can sign up to which will give the ability to test on many OS/Browser setups, including numerous mobile options.

In this article, we will cover:

1. Why Use SauceLabs?
2. Connecting Your Tests to SauceLabs
3. Parameterize your Rake File to Pass in Platform and Browser
4. Using a Secure Tunnel to Access Your Internal Application

In this article series we use Ruby as the implementation language (and we recommend Ruby when there is no other existing preference). However, these examples will translate easily to other languages like Java. 

If you are not familiar with Selenium, Cucumber and Gherkin take a look at our related introductory blog "The 5 Step Guide for Selenium, Cucumber, and Gherkin" and "Rake Up and Optimize Your Tests"

Cucumber, Selenium and Gherkin have become popular tools for helping teams implement test automation or what is often referred to as Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD) or Behavior Driven Development (BDD). As you grow your test suite and as it becomes larger and more complex, you may find your test project becomes bloated and messy. This article will lay out steps you can take to optimize your test organization and ways to provide unmeasured flexibility in running different tests on different browsers.

In this article, we will cover:

1. 'Tagging' Tests for better organization
2. 'Hook' up your tests with @Before and @After hooks
3. 'Support' your test organization with the Support folder
4. 'Rake' up your cucumber statements with a Rakefile

In this article series we use Ruby as the implementation language (and we recommend Ruby when there is no other existing preference). However, these examples will translate easily to other languages like Java.

INTRODUCTION:

INTRODUCTION:

INTRODUCTION:

Have you ever thought about learning AngularJS but didn’t know where to start? Today I’m going to show you how to quickly spin up an AngularJS 1.6.x application using a couple of different tools and then touch on the important AngularJS concepts to get you started.

Are you looking to streamline your software artifacts, application packages, open source dependencies? Wouldn't it be great to have a solution that is easy to install, upgrade, maintain, and has a very good web UI with minimal overhead? Along with that if the solutions come with RSS feeds to keep you updated on broken dependencies and provides high availability, faster downloads of your packages during builds or deployment. Whoa, I would want that now!!!

But wait, what if you also can get it for free? 

Well, all that is possible. if you choose Nexus repository manager. It comes as a open source or a paid version. You can decide based on your needs.

Nexus repository manager is used to manage software "artifacts" required for development. If you develop software, your builds can download dependencies from Nexus and can publish artifacts back to Nexus creating a great easy way to share artifacts within the organization. With Nexus, you can completely control access to, and deployment of, every artifact in your organization from a single location.

How can Nexus repository manager save your time and money?

• Supports almost all formats of binaries
• Java JAR, WAR, EAR formats
• Plain ZIP or .tar.gz files
• Other package formats such as NuGet packages, Ruby gems, NPM packages
• Executable formats such as .exe or .sh files, Android APK files, various installer formats
• Managing project dependencies,
• Artifacts and Metadata management
• Proxying external repositories
• Versioned central location to be shared within the organization

Here is how you install and configure nexus on linux platform.

In this example, we have installed:

• Apache Maven in /opt/apache-maven-3.3.3 directory and
• Sonatype Nexus OSS will be publishing at http://servername.devdomain.net:8081/nexus/

# Start by creating new user and group, you will prompted do add additional info.
sudo adduser nexus

#change to work dir
cd /tmp
#Then download fresh version of nexus. In my case v2.12.0-01
sudo wget http://download.sonatype.com/nexus/3/nexus-3.0.0-03-unix.sh.asc

#Create nexus basedir and change to it
sudo mkdir /usr/lib/nexus-oss
cd /usr/lib/nexus-oss/

#Extract nexus-2.12.0-01 omly directory from archive. No need of extracting working dir.
sudo tar xzvf /tmp/nexus-3.0.0-03-unix.tar.gz nexus-3.0.0-03-unix/

# Move it to wanted install dir sudo mv nexus-3.0.0-03-bundle /usr/local/ cd /usr/local # Create symb link to nexus sudo ln -s nexus-2.12.0-01-bundle nexus # create a symling in /etc/init.d called nexus pointing to the startup script for nexus sudo ln -s /usr/local/nexus/bin/jsw/linux-x86-64/nexus /etc/init.d/nexus # Make nexus executable cd /usr/local/nexus/ sudo chmod -R a+x bin Now we have nexus installed in a specified folder location in our server. Lets follow the next steps to run nexus in the server. sudo /etc/init.d/nexus start # Run nexus as a Service on Ubuntu cd /etc/init.d update-rc.d nexus defaults sudo service nexus start

Cucumber, Selenium and Gherkin have become popular tools for helping teams implement test automation or what is often referred to as Acceptance Test Driver Development (ATDD) or Behavior Driven Development (BDD).  In this article we will cover some more advanced features of the Gherkin language that can help you write tests that are simpler and more reusable.

We will cover:

1. Using Regular Expressions for Dynamic Data
2. Scenario Outlines
3. Tables as Arguments
4. Backgrounds

In this article series we use Ruby as the implementation language (and we recommend Ruby when there is no other existing preference). However, these examples will translate easily to other languages like Java.