Testing

D90 is a long-running Natural/Adabas application that supports core driver and vehicle licensing services. We’re moving it from its existing IBM mainframe environment to Linux running on AWS, which raises an obvious question: will it still work the same way? The application launched in the 1990s and has been refined ever since. Moving it to Linux running on AWS requires adapting to a different platform: encoding, sort order, I/O behaviour, and other assumptions built into the code over decades. We are adding Cucumber scenarios using Software AG’s browser-based Natural interface with Capybara and Playwright to ensure key features work as expected. ...

When trying to get an upper or lower value for a certain field in an object can be cumbersome. But when using the max_by method, this can actually be done quite elegantly. For example: persons = [ { "name" => "John McJohnson","age" => 34, "topScoreAtBowling" => 205}, { "name" => "Davey Jones","age" => 304, "topScoreAtBowling" => 300}, { "name" => "Willy Wonka","age" => 50, "topScoreAtBowling" => 200} ] If we had a bowling competition and wanted to see who had the topScoreAtBowling field, rather than looping through the array and looking at each object, we can simply use the max_by command as follows: ...

TiL how to toggle Ruby scenarios to be run using CI pipeline secrets Scenario In a relatively niche scenario, we have functionality that is being temporarily removed while new code is being developed. While we still want to keep our current scenarios for function X to use them again when it’s reintroduced, if they are left to run in our pipeline, every build will fail until it is reintroduced again. ...

Trying to run tests in parallel in your CI/CD pipeline is tricky at the best of times, but what if you have tests which should only be run in a certain environment and not as part of the CI build stage? It is fairly simple to just tag a feature file with a unique tag that can then be passed to the bundle exec rake command in the functional-tests step, as an environment variable. However, this tag will not stop these tests being run as part of the CI stage unless you make changes to how the tags are being used. ...

We’ve recently publicly released a Gem called dvla-atlas1, and today we are going to take you through a bit of history surrounding testing at the DVLA that led to use developing Atlas, along with a dive into some of the code that makes it tick. Atlas is designed to make the managing of properties in functional tests easier while also ensuring that each test is run in isolation and without any cross-pollination of test data. But first, lets take a look at what we mean by artefacts, and we used them in tests we’d written in Cucumber. ...