Overriding Cookbook Templates

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. […]

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Why Test On Different Networks

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, […]

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Using Virtual Machines for Software Development

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 […]

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Setting your knife.rb cookbook_path to match your cookbook locations

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” […]

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Parameter Passing in a Build Flow

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 […]

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Using a Build Flow for Deployments and Functional Testing

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 […]

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The Production Issue

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 […]

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From Naivety to Negligence

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 […]

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Getting Recorded Selenium Scripts Running In Sauce

Introduction As mobile native app testing tools continue to advance at a slow pace, mobile web app testing tools are advancing much quicker. There are several out there, including Sauce Labs and Testing Bot. These tools are great at taking browser based tests, and running them on emulated mobile devices, or even different desktop OS […]

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