Tuesday, February 21, 2017

It's all in perspective - virtual images for test automation use

I seem to fluctuate between two perspective to test automation that I get to witness. On some days (most) I find myself really frustrated with how much effort can go into such a little amount of testing. On other days, I find the platforms built very impressive even if the focus of what we test could still improve. And in reflection to how others are doing, I lower my standard and expectation for today, allowing myself to feel very happy and proud of what people have accomplished.

The piece that I'm in awe today is the operating system provisioning system that is in the heart of the way test automation is done here. And I just learned we have open sourced (yet apparently publicized very little) the tooling for this: https://github.com/F-Secure/dvmps

Just a high level view: imagine spawning 10 000 virtual machine for test automation use on a daily basis, with each running some set of tests. It takes just seconds to have a new machine up and running, and I often find myself tempted to use on of the machines for test automation, as the manual testing reserved images wait times are calculated in minutes.

With the thought of perspectives, I go for doing a little more research on how others do this. If you're working on scales like this, would love to benchmark experiences.