DevOps, Containerisation, and Tosca Test Automation - The Wellington Tosca Test Engineers Meetup

Test Automation continues to mature in New Zealand’s capital city. The topic of Tosca and DevOps brought out 32 current and aspiring Tosca Engineers who listened to two great presentations from within the Wellington Tosca Test Engineer community:

• Continuous Integration with Azure DevOps and Tosca: In collaboration with the Ministry of Education, Murali BL from Verity Consulting presented the Ministry’s integration of Tosca within the development pipeline they have established for a key project. Murali gave an overview of how Tosca based Test Automation is integrated with the Azure-based CI/CD pipeline with clear descriptions of the implemented process flows. The presentation covered the value that the integration into the pipeline is adding and how test artefacts developed by Testers are leveraged by the deployment team. Key messages from the presentation included Automation is a double-edged sword, a good design and implementation strategy will bring greater velocity to the delivery, and on the flip side, a poor implementation increases risk to timely delivery. In the world of automated Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD), Test Automation plays an important role. Without it, CI/CD is not feasible.
  

• Working in collaboration to get Tosca running with on-demand pipelines: Carl Ellis from TTC presented the vision that is being implemented at LINZ with respect to Tosca running with on-demand pipelines. Carl gave an excellent overview of the proposed roadmap for setting up the on-demand pipeline together with the lessons learned along the way. Getting Tosca automation up and running using Distributed Execution (DEX) to connect to an always on system under test is easy. Getting it working using Jenkins for on demand pipelines using AWS EC2 instances is a little harder. The presentation gave some useful insights to those considering similar journeys within their own organisations – how to approach and what to be aware of based on real world experiences.

The meetup was hosted by New Zealand’s Ministry of Education, and attendees came from both public and private sector organisations. Outside of the presentations, everyone took the opportunity to network throughout the course of the meetup. It was agreed that to further support the community a private Slack Channel will be set up. For access to this Slack Channel, please contact TTC.