Staying in

I’m staying in this weekend. Well it’s already 2 on Sunday, so really, I’m really continuing to stay in this weekend.

I’m trying to get work done on an little open source project I started.  Will it go ultimately anywhere?  If I never work on it, it’s a certainty it won’t. But if I do, who knows?

At any rate, I’m trying because that’s the expectation today for software developers.  At least in the big leagues that’s what your competing with.  People who are active on stack overflow or kernel developers or people who literally wrote the book on python.

I wants it! I can haz teh github project with 1,000 stars.

The project itself is massive.  It’s a port of Apache Jmeter to be web based a client application.   It’s an attempt to make Jmeter more cloud based and distributed.  I started it because I love Jmeter. I started my career in QA and so it’s always near and dear to my heart.  But also it’s critical component for any software company.

At any sufficiently large company, to deploy something into production quickly you need o have a deployment pipeline that executes all test cases you may have. If you have manual tests cases in a lab, you’re too slow.  I get that you may have manual tests ran in a blue/green deployment, and that’s fine.  That’s not going to interrupt and stagnate your deployment, because guess what, you’ve already deployed!   And stagnation is what your companies trying to avoid right?

Anyway…tons and tons of QA solutions exist and they’re all increasingly difficult to work with. That may make sense to some degree, because QA is large and to get right there are about a thousand moving parts. Like getting to deploy quickly through some orchestration like Kubernetes, Ansible, OpenStack, or just a library of custom shell scripts. Or maybe you want to spin a whole new environment just for testing with Vagrant (or more custom shell scripts!).  In any case, you need to deploy and configure your artifact and your dependencies.  Then, you need to run your test cases then you need to be able to present them in a meaningful and concise way. Having got the basics, maybe you want to schedule it? Maybe you want to run test cases in production as synthetic transactions. On top of that, all those tests running wouldn’t make a lick of sense if you didn’t get some sort of daily report or better yet an alert when their failing.

Integration and full end to end testing still presents a huge gap in projects simply because of the complexity involved and the crazy one off things people may need to test.

So, I’m staying in and working this weekend. I want testing to be easy and for that I’m going have to put the work in.   Like all infomercials, I too am saying, there’s got to be a better way. I intend to find it.