The Quest for Continuous Delivery

The path to Continuous Delivery (CD) happens to have stable execution results of automated test, so will be ideal if the developers could pass the automated test on their local machine before they integrate their code with the base code. But  if we want to execute the automated test on the developer local machine we have to be aware of:

1. The executions of the tests must be not intrusive, allowing the developers to focus on other tasks while the tests are executing.
2. The solution must be easily adaptable to changes, for example, if new tests suites are available or disabled,  this doesn't have to be an overhead work for the developers to synchronize with their local environment.

Sometimes these points are difficult to accomplish, i.e. if we have more than 500 automated functional test to be tested with a real browser (e.g. Firefox).  
Knowing the global solution explained in my previous post, it's easy with Docker and Jenkins to have a template that could build a "private platform" where execute 'locally'  all the  tests (unit, integrated, functional...)

You can see the simplified solution in the next diagram:

As you can see on the diagram, the solution is based on Docker compose which builds Jenkins in a Docker container: a Jenkins Master and n-slaves Jenkins  (depending on configuration parameters). It will execute the test with Selenium/Firefox, where the test live in the local FileSystem of the host. In this case, for convenience and not to overload the developers' machines, we won't test on IE  (but we could use a Vagrant virtual-machine with Windows and IE)...

The key points of this kind of configuration are:

• Run Automated Test in background.
• Light GUI containers to run Firefox with Selenium.
• Parallel execution of the tests. 
• Easy installation and updates.
• We can see the visual errors of the navigation in the pdfs generated by the framework of test (see previous post).

Republished in part from my blog, read it in its entirety on Swinging the bottle website.

P.S. Thank you to Manel Naspreda and Jordi Fernandez for their collaboration.