We are a MSFT shop with a far-reaching MSDN license.
After many years of doing things wrong, we finally have to start doing automated testing.
My group is the Guinea pigs at this. We need to create what was not there before. We looked at the multitude of options out there. Some people get by just fine with open-source alternatives such as CC.Net, Bamboo, MbUnit, etc. We want to give MsTest, CodedUI, Team Build a good try ... might as well because of MSDN licensing and MSFT focus.
The plus and minus of doing things the MSFT way is that MSFT makes monolithic things. You have got to install various tools that play with each other nicely, but with outsiders - not necessarily. The plus is that when things are done correctly, it should all function rather smoothly. There is the option of gated check-ins, of using TFS to store the reports, etc.
Frankly, I am confused by all of the options. Our traditional build system was hacked together with a bunch of perl, batch scripts, executables, but now the build team switched to Team Build, which ought to be cleaner, but for the most part it is just a wrapper to the same old perl crap.
I am inclined to hack things together for testing too, because I can at least see what the pieces are. So, I envision the poor man's version as:
* A dedicated fast computer to run tests
* Some script to copy build files (test code as well as product code) over to that computer.
* A batch/perl script which would run mstest.exe from command line and execute a few test batches on some by-category filter within some test dlls (the product is so huge, that we do want to organize tests by various categories).
* Some script which will invoke the latter script remotely from the build server using psexec.exe (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897553), as well as grabbing the xml output from a shared drive, and then sending out an email with results to those who are interested.
This can probably work, but then I have to worry about how well error handling can work with so many potential points of failure. It would be nice to configure things the "right way", taking advantage of whatever MSFT has cooked up. I am just not sure where to turn for a good guide. Have you done something like this?
Eventually we will want to have a farm of test computers, if we are to run out of the allotted time. Something else of concern is - for coded ui tests to succeed, I think a user has to be logged in, so I am not sure if psexec will be of much help here.
Can you share your positive/negative experience, point me to a good guide perhaps? Thanks!
Here are some tips off the top of my head if you want to get started with testing using the MS tools:
If you have an MSDN subscription, install a Test Rig by installing the Test Controller on your network and the the Test Agent service on each of the machines that will be collecting diagnostic data. See the following link for reference: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd293551.aspx.
Add a Test Project to your solution. See the first part of the following blog post: http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/eranruso/archive/2010/03/27/visual-studio-2010-coded-ui-test-user-guide-create-a-simple-coded-ui-test.aspx.
Automated test options can be configured through the .testsettings file(s) that are added automatically when you add a Test project (you can also manually add these files to your solution).
Install Team Foundation Server (2010 recommended) in order to take advantage automating your tests with a daily build. You will also need TFS 2010 if you want to use the VS2010 Test Manager tool to define test environments and plan manual tests (these can be fully automated with CodedUI). Customize your new automated build to setup / deploy your application after build and set the build to run tests. Deployment will likely not be necessary for unit tests, but they will be for Web Performance and CodedUI test types.
If you have VS Ultimate or Test Professional licenses, you can also go further and set up virtual test labs using "Lab Management" features.
Related
My problem is that I can't use R-studio at my work place as the IT does not support it . I want to use R and R-studio that installed on my personnel laptop on my company laptop ( using a modern browser which is behind firewall ) . Some of the options I am thinking of two two things
should I need to build a docker for R and R-studio (I see base images are already available) , I am mostly interested in basic R , Dplyr (haven ,xporter, and Reticulate ) packages .
Should I have to use a binder . I am not technical person and my programming skills are very limited can any one suggest me way .
What exactly are the difference between using Docker option vs Binder ?
I know I can use R-Studio online and get my work done but with the new paid account I am running out of project hours and very slow sometimes . Thanks in advance
Here are some examples beyond the modern RStudio MyBinder example:
https://github.com/fomightez/pythonista_skewedf
https://github.com/fomightez/r_phylogenetics_worshop
https://github.com/fomightez/chapter7/tree/master/binder
The modern RStudio MyBinder example has been set as a template on GitHub so you can use
The first one is for a special use of a package not on conda. And I started that one from square one.
The other two were converted from content by others to aid in making them Binder-ready.
You essentially list everything you need from conda in the environment.yml along with the appropriate channels. If you need special stuff not on conda, you need the other configuration files included there.
Getting everything working can take some iterations on adding things, letting the image get built, and testing your libraries are available. Although you seem to think your situation is not overly complex.
The binder launch badges you see are just images where you modify the URL to point the MyBinder federation site at your repository. Look at the URL and you should see the pattern where you put studio at the end of the URL pointing at your repo. The form at MyBinder.org site can help with this; however, most often it is easier to just adapt a working launch badge's code copied from elsewhere. The form isn't set up at this time for making the URLs for launching to RStudio.
Download anything useful your create in a running session. The sessions timeout after 10 minutes, although RStudio usually keeps them active.
Lack of Persistence and limited memory, storage, & power can be drawbacks. The inherent reproducibility and portability are advantages.
MyBinder.org doesn't work with private repos. If you have code you don't want to share, you can upload it to the temporary session, using the repo for specifying the environment. You could host a private binderhub that does allow the use of private git repositories; however, that is probably overkill for your use case and exceed your ability level at this time.
GitHub isn't the only place to host repositories that can be pointed at the MyBinder system. If you go to the MyBinder.org page and click where it says 'GitHub' on the left side of the top line of the form, you can see a list of the sources at which you can host a repository and point the system to build an image and launch a container with that specified image.
Building the image from a source repository takes some minutes the first time. Once the image is built though on the service, launch is typically less than 30 seconds. Each time you make a change on the source repo, a build is necessary. Some changes don't cause the new build to be as long as the initial one as some optimizing is done to only build what is necessary after a change. Keep in mind there are several members of the federation around the workd and if traffic on the internet gets sent to where the built image isn't yet available, it will be built from scratch again first.
The Holepunch project is out there to offer some help for users working in the R ecosystem; however, with the R-Conda system that is now integrated into MyBinder it is pretty much as easy to do it the way I described. Last I knew, the Holepunch route makes a Dockerfile that isn't as easy to troubleshoot as using the current the R-Conda system route. Dockerfiles are essentially a last ditch configuration file that MyBinder can handle. The reason being the other configuration files are much easier and don't require knowing Dockerfile syntax. MyBinder aims to offer the ability to take advantage of Docker offering containers with a specified environment without users needing to know anything about Docker.
There is a Binder Help category for posting to get help at the Jupyter Discourse Forum. Some other examples of posts already there may help you troubleshoot.
Notice of a common pitfall
Most of the the configuration files for making a repository Binder-ready are simply text and can be edited right in the GitHub browser interface, without need to git or even cloning the repo locally.
Last I knew, there are two exceptions to this. The postBuild and start configuration files have settings that allow them to be run as scripts and these get altered in a way they no longer work if you edit them via the GitHub browser interface. (This was my experience when last I tried. Your mileage may vary or things may have changed now.) To edit those, you have to have git available on a system you have and pull one from some other source. Then edit that on your machine that has git working & add it your repo and push it back up from your local computer.
(If this is a problem, you can post in the Jupyter Discourse Forum Binder help category and you and I could coordinate where I fork and edit those files in your repo to your specifications and then make a pull request to update your source of the fork with those changes.)
If you are using Jupyter notebooks extensively then it may make sense to use Binder
But if you simply want to use R and Rstudio, then all you need is docker. A good resource is
https://github.com/rocker-org/rocker
Net solution for a website, consisting of 5 projects, and there are a few(less than 10) developers working on the solution. We deploy almost on a daily basis.
The question is, how to setup the SVN repo to support this scenario (the daily deploy), also mentioning that not every commited file should go to production, there is a QA check before deploying.
Try out TeamCity
(CI tool) as its free for smaller amounts of CI. this may be better for you than CruiseControl.Net as CCNET is very configuration heavy as its all done via XML. TeamCity uses wizards to create the scripts to manage releases
if you need any other help on CI then let me know as its something I am evangelistic about.
What you want to do is commonly referred to as Continuous integration (CI).
While you can do that using Subversion, it is probably not the right tool for the job.
There is special CI software, which will allow you to easily automate the necessary tasks (checkout from version control, compiling / building, running automatic tests, deployment etc). An example would be CruiseControl.NET.
As to "not every commited file should go to production", the common solution is to have a special "release" branch, which gets deployed. Only tested code is merged there (or have the trunk always be stable, otherwise same model). Of course, you can also (better: additionally) have tests before your automatic deployment, and only deploy if all tests pass.
Working with a release branch
In practice, this means that people check in their code as they produce it. Sometimes this code will work, sometimes not. When the release time draws nearer, a "release branch" is created in Subversion. This release branch is then effectively a frozen snapshot of the source as it was at the time of branching. Now this branch can be used to compile & deploy the application, which can then be tested.
No new code is checked into the branch (but checkins can continue elsewhere). Only if a bug is detected in the branch, will there be a checkin into the branch to fix it. This continues until the branch passes all tests. Then the branch can be released as a new version of the software; afterwards the branch will only be used if the released version needs to be patched.
Of course, any bugfixes checked into the branch need to also be put into the trunk (either by merging branch -> trunk, for which Subversion provides special support, or by reimplementing the fix in the trunk, as appropriate).
Ok.. I have looked through this site and just can't seem to find the answer I am looking for.
We have a multi server setup for our web sites, typically (DEV/QA/PRODUCTION). Our sites are .net which require some sort of build before being deployed. We are using SVN for source control and are looking for a tool/website/something that will allow our project managers to push button deploy changes to the different environments. It seems there is no silver bullet for this, am I correct in this assumption?
I like the functionality of Springloops but can't find any information regarding its use with .net. Sparing details, it would be nice to see a diagram of sorts on the whole end to end process. What I mean by that is, if multiple different tools are the only answer (no silver bullet), then a diagram that shows where the tools sit in relation to the whole process.
Look at CruiseControl.Net. It'll let you automate your builds and if there are errors it can notify certain people and even flash a big red light in the office.
The other thing it can do is automatically deploy to a chosen region such as Dev/Test/Stage/Prod when there are no errors.
Though you may want to make Prod a manual press of a button. :)
The new on click publishing features in Visual Studio 2010 are pretty easy to set up ans use: http://vishaljoshi.blogspot.com/2009/05/web-1-click-publish-with-vs-2010.html
Supports configuring IIS and deploying SQL packages too.
There is a msdeploy.exe file included in the that you could setup to run with .bat files or some configurable script runner.
Try ClickOnce deployment. Once a update is deployed on the server the client applications are automatically get updated on every client on their next run.
We are in the process of implementing automated regression testing for our applications, and are looking for a solid batch-testing utility. We have QuickTest Professional 10.0, and it comes bundled with 'Test Batch Runner' which appears to be deprecated. It appears in previous versions there was 'Multi-Test Manager', which has been discontinued as well.
What alternatives exist, if any?
The canonical way to do this is via Quality Center, if you don't have QC you can use QTP's automation model from a vbs file. The documentation for this is available in Start -> Programs -> QuickTest Professional -> Documentation -> Automation Object Model Reference
QTP 10 works excellent with Multi Test Manager V8.2.4.
We use it for our project (previously used it with QTP 9.2).
Try google for an installation (of you don't have one), it should be free but just not supported by HP anymore.
From WinRunner times I very extensively used Test Driver scripts with great success due to the following benefits:
non-programming testers can easily create/maintain batches as their stored in XML format
test input files are externally configurable through mapping
a variety of customization parameters supported, from login credentials to prefixes and switches
test dependencies could be established so that if critical test cases is failed the whole branch of dependant test cases is skipped.
Now I continue using Test Drivers and introducing them to clients.
And Test Driver approach was integrated not only by the client companies that do not use Quality Center. Some others followed it because it gives much more flexibility and robustness in automated test plan execution.
Thank you,
Albert Gareev
http://automationbeyond.wordpress.com
I echo Motti...if i get your question right ....You can see the below written link as well..
Work with Test Batch runner
Assume that I set up an automatic nightly build. What artifacts of the build should I save?
For example:
Input source code
output binaries
Also, how long should I save them, and where?
Do your answers change if I do Continuous Integration?
You shouldn't save anything for the sake of saving it. you should save it because you need it (i.e., QA uses nightly builds to test). At which point, "how long to save it" becomes however long QA wants them.
i wouldn't "save" source code so much as tag/label it. I don't know what source control you're using, but tagging is trivial (performance & disk space) for any quality source control system. Once your build is tagged, unless you need binaries, there really isn't any benefit to just having them around because you can simply re-compile when necessary from source.
Most CI tools let you tag on each successful build. This can become problematic for some systems as you can easily have 100+ tags a day. For such cases I recommend still running a nightly build and only tagging that.
Here are some artifacts/information that I'm used to keep at each build:
The tag name of the snapshot you are building (tag and do a clean checkout before you build)
The build scripts themselfs or their version number (if you treat them as a separate project with its own version control)
The output of the build script: logs and final product
A snapshot of your environment:
compiler version
build tool version
libraries and dll/libs versions
database version (client & server)
ide version
script interpreter version
OS version
source control version (client and server)
versions of other tools used in the process and everything else that might influence the content of your build products. I usually do this with a script that queries all this information and logs it to a text file that should be stored with the other build artifacts.
Ask yourself this question: "if something destroys entirely my build/development environment what information would I need to create a new one so I can redo my build #6547 and end up with the exact same result I got the first time?"
Your answer is what you should keep at each build and it will be a subset or superset of the things I already mentioned.
You can store everything in your SCM (I'd recommend a separate repository), but in this case your question on how long you should keep the items looses sense. Or you should store it to zipped folders or burn a cd/dvd with the build result and artifacts. Whatever you choose, have a backup copy.
You should store them as long as you might need them. How long, will depend on your development team pace and your release cycle.
And no, I don't think it changes if you do continous integration.
This isn't a direct answer to your question, but don't forget to version control the nightly build setup itself. When the project structure changes, you may have to change the build process, which will break older builds from that point on.
In addition to the binaries as everyone else has mentioned I would recomend setting up a symbol server and a source server and making sure you get the correct information out and into those. It will aid in debugging tremendously.
We save the binaries, stripped and unstripped (so we have the exactly same binary, once with and once without debug symbols). Further we build everything twice, once with debug output enabled and once without (again, stripped and unstripped, so every build result in 4 binaries). The build is stored to a directory according to SVN revision number. That way we can always retain the source from the SVN repository by simply checking out this very revision (that way the source is archived as well).
A surprising one I learned about recently: If you're in an environment that might be audited you'll want to save all the output of your build, the script output, the compiler output, etc.
That's the only way you can verify your compiler settings, build steps, etc.
Also, how long to save them for, and where to save them?
Save them until you know that build won't be going to production, iow as long as you have the compiled bits around.
One logical place to save them is your SCM system. Another option is to use a tool that will automatically save them for you, like AnthillPro and its ilk.
We're doing something close to "embedded" development here, and I can tell you what we save:
the SVN revision number and timestamp, as well as the machine it was built on and by whom (also burned into the build binaries)
a full build log, showing whether it was a full/incremental build, any interesting (STDERR) output the data baking tools produced, a list of files compiled and any compiler warnings (this compresses very well, being text)
the actual binaries (for anywhere from 1-8 build configurations)
files produced as a side effect of linking: a linker command file, address map, and a sort of "manifest" file indicating what was burned into the final binaries (CRC and size for each), as well as the debugging database (.pdb equivalent)
We also mail out the result of running some tools over the "side-effect" files to interested users. We don't actually archive these since we can reproduce them later, but these reports include:
total and delta of filesystem size, broken down by file type and/or directory
total and delta of code section sizes (.text, .data, .rodata, .bss, .sinit, etc)
When we have unit tests or functional tests (e.g. smoke tests) running, those results show up in the build log.
We've not thrown out anything yet -- given, our target builds usually end up at ~16 or 32 MiB per configuration, and they're fairly compressible.
We do keep uncompressed copies of the binaries around for 1 week for ease of access; after that we keep only the lightly compressed version. About once a month we have a script that extracts each .zip that the build process produces and 7-zips a whole month of build outputs together (which takes advantage of only having small differences per build).
An average day might have a dozen or two builds per project... The buildserver wakes up about every 5 minutes to check for relevant differences and builds. A full .7z on a large very active project for one month might be 7-10GiB, but it's certainly affordable.
For the most part, we've been able to diagnose everything this way. Occasionally there's a hiccup on the buildsystem and a file isn't actually a the revision it's supposed to be when a build happens, but there's usually enough evidence of this in the logs. Sometimes we have to dig out a tool that understands the debugging database format and feed it a few addresses to diagnose a crash (we have automatic stackdumps built into the product). But usually all the information needed is there.
We haven't had to crack the .7z archives yet, to mention. But we have the info there, and I have some interesting ideas on how to mine bits of useful data from it.
Save what can't be reproduced easily. I work on FPGAs where only the FPGA team have the tools and some cores (libraries) of the design are licensed to compile on only one machine. So we save the output bitstreams. But try to check them over one another rather than with a date/time/version stamp.
Save as in check in to source code control or just on disk? Save nothing to source code control. All derived files should be visible in the file system and available to developers. Don't checkin binaries, code generated from XML files, message digests etc. A separate packaging step will make these end products available. As you have the change number you can always reproduce the build if necessary assuming of course everything you need to do a build is completely in the tree and is available to all builds by syncing.
I would save your built binaries for exactly as long as they have a chance to go into production or be used by some other team (like a QA group). Once something has left production, what you do with it can vary a lot. For a lot of teams, they'll keep just their most recent prior build around (for rollback) and otherwise discard their builds.
Others have regulatory requirements to keep anything that went into production around for as long as seven years (banks). If you are a product company, I'd keep around any binary a customer might have installed in case a tech support guy wants to install the same version.