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Anders Hovmöller
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A nice testing environment

2019-11-20

At work we have a testing environment that is pretty nice. I’ll describe it to hopefully spark some ideas for how you can improve your system. The basic requirements we’ve had for many years is:

So far so standard. The way our testing environment is built and we get feedback from it is the secret sauce. The high level view:

This means it’s very easy to remove a change from the test environment: just click needs work on it. This way we don’t have a queue, which is very important because we’re a pretty big team, and we then also don’t have to do trunk based development where we would end up with broken code on the trunk and not being able to safely deploy.

The thing that makes this system really shine is all the little niceties:

In addition to all of this, we are heavy users of a little tool I’ve written called DevBar. It’s a macOS1 menu bar app that talks to a server which collects data from various sources and displays them for you. It will show:

Then we also have a few more statuses in the DevBar which are very nice:

Summary

This is a workflow we’ve refined over several years and it’s very nice. I hope you’ve found something on this list that you can implement in your workflow to make life easier.

1 We have linux and windows clients too, but they’re a little more experimental at the moment.

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