Autoscale Your CI Pipeline

    Building software in the cloud makes scalability an easy and achievable goal for your organization.  As the demand on your Jenkins executor capacity increases, you need to be able to scale your Jenkins footprint to keep up with the demand. This is where the Amazon EC2 Plugin can make a huge impact to […]

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Spring Batch vs Akka Part 2

This is a continuation of Spring Batch vs Akka. Batching I ran each of these with a commit size of 1 and 10 for a total of 100 records. I was curious what types of improvements would be seen for each batch job and how the increased processing would affect completion time. Additionally, the idea of […]

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Spring Batch vs Akka

In this I will talk about Java batch implementations in two different frameworks: Spring Batch and Akka. I looked at both frameworks for a simple ETL program. I ran each of these with a commit size of 1 and of 10. I was curious what types of improvements would be seen for each batch job […]

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BsidesDC 2015… A Recap: Credit Card Failures and Web App Testing

To summarize the 3 day B-SidesDC conference: Be Afraid. In all seriousness, there are many systems we use daily which are quite vulnerable. The solution is to be vigilant, know what to look for, and understand how to fix it. It is good to know that the industry mindset is migrating towards an “Assume Breach” […]

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Creating a Trace Matrix in Confluence

I am currently working on a project in which we are helping a company transition to using the agile software development methodology.  As part of this transition to agile we set up Jira, Confluence, and Zephyr — Jira is used for managing work (epics, user stories, requirements, and test cases), Confluence is a wiki used for managing […]

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#WhyGradle: Gradle vs Maven Performance

I’ve written a lot of blogs about how to do certain technical things in Gradle, in this blog I will compare the performance features of Gradle to that of Maven’s. As of Gradle 2.5 and Maven 3.3.3 Gradle supports incremental builds, where Maven does not. Gradle’s incremental builds work off the simple concept of re-building […]

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CompareGradleBuilds Feature

I was reading through some Gradle documentation, and I came across this task CompareGradleBuilds. What this task does is it runs your build on the current version of Gradle, and then runs the build on a different specified version of Gradle, and produces a report that says if the builds are identical or not. I […]

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Compatibility Testing – Local Simulation Tricks For Mobile Web Applications

Introduction After giving a talk last week with Sauce Labs about compatibility testing for mobile web apps, I got several questions about simulation using Selenium Webdriver. I had written back in June about compatibility testing using Selenium IDE, but the talk expanded on this concept, allowing tests run in client languages to perform similar actions. […]

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Setting Up Headless Selenium Tests On RHEL 6.7

In order to set up headless tests on RHEL 6.7, you will need Xvfb, which is a virtual framebuffer that performs the graphical operations without showing anything on the screen. The browser that I chose to use for my headless tests was Firefox. In order to install Xvfb on RHEL use yum: yum install xorg-x11-server-Xvfb […]

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Gradle, Square Peg Round Hole

Intro On the current engagement we are using gradle to automate the build process. Gradle can lend itself to scripting through groovy. Anything groovy can do gradle can do. I’m interested in more than just building the application automatically. When it comes to Continuous Integration (CI) we often need to do more than just build […]

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