Insight and analysis from thought leaders in agile development and testing, DevOps, security, test automation, and more.
My colleague Rich Mills created a great post about a script to get PEM certs into databags. To sum up, the major issue was that the white space was interfering with the knife upload command. The knife script uses the ruby, some chef gems, ruby file manipulation, and the chef api to properly create the […]
As a general practice when using community cookbooks I try not to, unless absolutely necessary, update the code in the cookbook. This makes updating the version of the cookbook in your git repository to the latest and greatest a bit easier. Sometimes the community cookbook does not behave exactly the way I want it to behave. […]
Introduction Mobile App Testing involves networks, not just the app or device itself. Understanding the basics of telecommunications will always give you advantages when doing testing mobile applications. Testers need to understand the impact of network and communications on testing scope. This is the first in a multi-post segment for understanding the differences between networks, […]
On my current project I am using a virtual machine (VM) that was provided by the architecture team for software development. While I have found using this VM to be extremely useful, some developers on the project continue to build and deploy the application directly on their host machines, perhaps out of habit or an unwillingness […]
We have a situation where we use a lot of transient EC2 instances that are part of an integrated set of demonstration machines. They all refer to each other by DNS name that we have set up in a Route53 domain within AWS. For cost reasons, we shut these machines down any time we are […]
Always make sure you set your cookbook_path in knife.rb to something that makes sense for your working environment. People often get confused by how/where the ‘knife’ command is finding cookbooks during commands like “knife cookbook upload” or even “knife cookbooks create.” I remember when I first leaned Chef, I would type “knife cookbook create foo_book” […]
As a direct followup to my previous post, I thought the discussion of passing parameters in a build flow might be useful. Let’s start with our previous example. I’ve created a build flow that deploys an application and runs Front-End, Back-End and Integration Tests against that application in parallel. In addition, we’ve added several features […]
Jenkins is a powerful tool in your Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery toolbox. For my last clients over the past several years, we have utilized Jenkins to deploy software and preform automated testing. One of the most powerful tools I have used to orchestrate deployments and testing has been the Build Flow Plugin. It has allowed […]
If you’ve been working in software development then you’re probably very familiar with the term “production issue”. This is a problem that is discovered in the production environment that causes the application to become unavailable or to exhibit incorrect behavior. For example, a production issue in an online banking system might be that customers’ account […]
I understand the plight of senior executives, I really do. Most don’t have a software background and that makes it difficult for them to fully understand application security. But when security breeches are caused by basic, simple code vulnerabilities that can be found using readily available tools, it makes me wonder how serious businesses even […]
