Surveillance testing

We are far from being experts in testing but we detected a necessity and we did not know how to name it exactly.

While we were creating a library for an easy use of a web service, and you may find it hard to believe but we were using unit testing in its creation. Finally we agreed in the next points.

- The WS we are using is a risky item, due it was done by others for us, and the service might change, fail or degrade its performance.
- Unit testing should not use the WS, because it must be unit, isn't it?
- The testing we need is close to "system testing", but system testing aren't so prone to automatize, and the compilation of a library shouldn't depend on a test against a remote server.

With those and several more ideas, we thought of automate it through unit testing a series of tests, using our library, against the WS server, so we could monitor the server, its response times, its availability. So we will finally create a different project only to check the server, using our library, and potentially that project will be completed with other test for other dependencies.

There will be multiple pros with this approach, going further than a monitoring tool could reach.
- Development department scope, for those companies that look a battlefield.
- Unit test executed regularly with Jenkins, no more software needed.
- Sometimes providers make mistakes, we must know the sooner possible.

Result:
A new source empty project, with some unit test using our library, using the external web service, and checking it is ok. This project is inside our software cycle, using SVN, Artifactory and Jenkins, and it is scheduled for a midnight execution. If a test fails, an email will be sent telling us about it.
Now we talk about a new kind of test in our department :)

Keep learning!

Book of the month: Ender's Game

It did not take me three months to read it, neh? Indeed, I have not finished reading it yet, but I have to make the most of my spare time and I will write as much as I could today.

Ender's Game tell us about the solitude of the power, the hard of being a highly-gifted person and the jealousies it brings. How respect is won through excellence and not by fear or threatens. It is a model where the best are isolated in order to get the most of them.

It is curious that, during the reading of this book, I have also read this:

http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2007/marapr/features/dweck.html
Explanation in Spanish: http://www.cookingideas.es/el-efecto-del-esfuerzo-20110424.html

They, a sci-fi book about highly-gifted and an English research, met in a similar way to educate children in order to keep high the motivation (or how to squeeze their brains up). The main idea, do not tag a child as bad, do not tag a child as good. Although a craft may be perfect, it is the craftsman can always learn. Do not tell your child he is in the top because he can stop learning.

ps: in the last months all I've read is Isaac Asimov's some novels, they are enjoyable, but except "I Robot", the rest of the Robots novels do not teach so much. That's the reason I have not write a word about book recommendations.

Roll your own Continuous Integration System (C.I.S.): Artifactory installation, Linux, MySQL and Tomcat 6.x

Roll your own Continuous Integration System (C.I.S.)

Content:

Abstract

Install Tomcat

Basic Tomcat configuration - Memory

Basic Tomcat configuration - JMX

Basic Tomcat configuration - Application Manager and permissions

Apache and uSVN

Installing Artifactory from WAR

Configure Artifactory and MySQL

Configuring Artifactory security and repositories

War installation

There are numerous well-formed tutorials about how to install Artifactory as the chosen Maven Dependencies Repository of our Continuous Integration System.

I will summarize their steps as concisely as possible:

• Create a directory with owner tomcat.tomcat (user/group) where Artifactory is meant to put all its information and artifacts. Let's say... /var/artifactory
• Edit /usr/share/tomcat6/conf/tomcat6.conf and add the variable anywhere in the file. I prefer at top. ARTIFACTORY_HOME="/var/artifactory"
• Download last version of OSS Artifactory (Or pay the license if you find it worthy, of course).
• Unzip and install artifactory.war into your Tomcat6, remember how?
• you may copy artifactory.war into /usr/share/tomcat6/webapps/ if you have direct control over the filesystem, or
• you may use the Manager (/manager/html) application if you installed it previously
• Once artifactory is copied, automatically is run, and you should see in your ARTIFACTORY_HOME how some directories have appeared. Now you have a secureless, derby-managed Artifactory installation not ready for production, but perfect for testing.

A trip to a default configured Artifactory

Some default features:
- It supports Maven, Ivy and Gradle systems. We will only use Maven here.
- Artifactory provide several remote dependency repositories, and it will act as a proxy downloading and storing from those repositories for you.
- A dead-simple security schema. It is possible only for admins to upload files. User:admin, Pass: password. Shhh, it's a secret ;)
- Search engine for classes, packages and other files.


Welcome Page:

Do you need more explanations?

Maven settings:

As said before, Artifactory can serve to Maven, Gradle and Ivy.
See the Home tab -> Left menu -> Client settings -> Maven Settings. (You are allowed to nose around Ivy and Gradle, but don't tell me :P )
Next, you have some sections to declare and put in your settings.xml configuration file. It's a bit early for this, don't worry, only keep it in mind.

Artifacts:

Some layouts to improve your feeling in searches (What the fuck, so much time reading Microsoft marketing), mainly they are offered to you both tree and list structure.

The tree layout is created through the groupId + artifactId, being the default repositories the roots of the trees, one for each repository.

Notice that if you click over a repository, you will get a Maven snippet for your pom.xml, for example:


<distributionManagement>
    <repository>
        <id>linux-wdx0</id>
        <name>linux-wdx0-releases</name>
        <url>http://localhost:8080/artifactory/libs-3rd-party</url>
    </repository>
</distributionManagement>


If you paste the snippet in your pom.xml (remember, only one distributionManagement per pom.xml, so, if you already have one, you will have to merge them), you will be able to upload (if you are authorized, of course) generated artifacts to that repository with "mvn deploy" in deploy phase.

Default repositories in Artifactory:
libs-release-local: Your libraries and products go here, only releases.
libs-snapshots-local: Your libraries and products go here, snapshots.
plugins-release-local: Your plugins, or plugins needed by you, releases, here.
plugins-snapshots-local: Your plugins, or plugins needed by you, releases, here.
ext-releases-local: 3rd party libraries, releases, needed by your projects. (i.e. Spring, ojdbc driver.. )
ext-snapshot-local: 3rd party libraries, snapshots, needed by your projects.

Artifact resolution in Artifactory:
I do not like to simply repeat what is already written and it is not improvable by me:
http://wiki.jfrog.org/confluence/display/RTF/Understanding+Repositories

Here finishes first chapter about Artifactory. Coming soon:  Simple security and customization of repositories.

Enhacing your Testing, Performance, Load, Stress...

I have been asked for something I wanted to learn. Stress testing of our applications before publishing them on the web.

I don't know a word yet about it, I have first to evaluate some tools, some methodology, and then design the test and ... by then, surely the application will have been already published.

First stop:

http://www.pylot.org

http://clif.ow2.org/

http://sourceforge.net/projects/dieseltest/

http://java.net/projects/faban/

http://code.google.com/p/grinderstone/

http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/linux/httperf/

http://iperf.sourceforge.net/

http://www.ixorarms.com/

http://jchav.blogspot.com/

http://jcrawler.sourceforge.net/

http://www.loadui.org/

http://opensta.org/

http://www.joedog.org/

http://tsung.erlang-projects.org/

http://jakarta.apache.org/jmeter/

 

I have much to read.