From the Pipeline v3.0

The following will be a regular feature where we share articles, podcasts, and webinars of interest from the web. This week we’ll showcase a articles on CI/CD Pipelines, Continuous Testing, the Spotify Model, Unit Tests, and a Webinar series on Automation.

Announcing General Availability of YAML CD features in Azure Pipelines

For those of you working in Azure DevOps, Microsoft recently made an update to their Pipelines feature to help support CI/CD. Entire CI/CD workflows can be defined in a YAML file and be versioned with the rest of the code.

How to Create An Automated Test Strategy + Plan

Great article by Perfecto that provides a high-level view of crafting an automated test strategy. Nearly every software company is aiming for CI/CD or maximizing the efficiency of their existing CI/CD. The article provides those steps, from value stream mapping the pipeline to building in flexibility to the testing platform. There is plenty of solid references in the article as well for those looking to learn more about automated testing in general and continuous testing in particular.

Failed Squad Goals

A wonderful look at the Spotify Model by Jeremiah Lee from his time at the company. The Spotify Model is revealed to be more aspirational than actual, with the company struggling from the management side of growth to team collaboration. As someone who has previously used the Spotify Health Check Model for teams, I’m fascinated by this look into Spotify and feedback from people who actually worked there.

Unit Tests Are Tests of Modularity

Michael Feathers posts a fascinating article that questions the size of a unit test. He posits a unit test can be a class, a function, or a cluster of either so long as it’s something “small” that is a unit of the application under test. The unit test should align with and enforce modularity and encapsulation. I think his views offer a smart philosophy to approaching code – if you are having difficulty writing tests then that’s a good indication the code could be more module so you can see the distinct pieces.

The Summer of Learning

BrowserStack established a free “Summer of Learning” webinar series for people interested in automated testing of web- and mobile-applications. Recently David Burns joined the BrowserStack team. David is a core contributor to Selenium and was previously responsible for GeckoDriver (Firefox) while working at Mozilla. This webinar series is a great idea to uplift skills while most of us are working from home.

Episode 1 — The Basics: Getting started with Selenium: An introduction to Selenium, how to set up/write your first test scripts, and how to pick the right framework. This is a great introductory session for those looking to learn test automation in 60 minutes.

Episode 2 — Introduction to BrowserStack Automate: In this episode, you’ll learn how to set up and run your first test with Automate, how to test on various real devices and browsers on the BrowserStack Real Device cloud, how to test your local instance on the cloud, and how to collaborate and debug better.

Episode 3 — Continuous testing at scale: You’ll learn how to build an efficient, well-integrated CI pipeline that helps release quality software at speed. You’ll also learn how to use BrowserStack to deploy faster and listen to stories from great companies like The Weather Channel, who release to millions of users every day.

Episode 4 — Selenium + BrowserStack at scale: In Episode 4, David Burns, core contributor to Selenium will explain how to plan parallelization more effectively to achieve faster build times, the best ways to maintain test hygiene while scaling your team or automation suite, and how to monitor test feedback effectively.

Episode 5 — Testing for a mobile-first market: There are 9,000 distinct mobile devices in the market—and you most definitely can’t test on them all. But with this episode, you’ll learn the best strategy to pick the right devices for testing your website or mobile app.

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