Author Topic: eBox testing environment ANSTE one of O'Reilly's Beautiful Testing essays  (Read 4954 times)

hvilppola

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We're proud to announce that an essay regarding the Advanced Network Service Testing Environment (ANSTE) that was developed in order to carry out eBox Platform testing has been included in O'Reilly's Beautiful Testing book that is to be published on the 30th of October. Beautiful Testing, edited by Tim Riley and Adam Goucher, offers 23 essays from 27 leading testers and developers that illustrate the qualities and techniques that make testing an art.

"eBox Platform is a complex tool that integrates a number of independent network services, released as a set of independent modules that need to be thoroughly tested to prevent regressions and to verify the correct functioning of each feature" said Isaac Clerencia, author of the "Testing Network Services in Multimachine Scenarios" essay and developer at eBox Technologies. "After a year or so since we started developing eBox Platform, getting a new release out had become a struggle due to the lengthy testing and quality assurance process. What is more, these tasks had quickly become the most dreaded ones among eBox developers and we figured out that something had to be done."

"As we couldn't find an existing testing tool that would suit our needs, we ended developing our own open source testing suite" said José Antonio Calvo, ANSTE developer and developer at eBox Technologies, and continued "the result was ANSTE that allows you to easily define complex network scenarios with multiple virtual machines, to run or to remotely schedule the tests according to pre-defined test suites that include command-based and Selenium-based tests and finally obtain a full report that is made available through a web interface."

"We think ANSTE is a beautiful network service testing solution that can help in the testing process of any software that involves several machines connected to a network" said Isaac Clerencia. "ANSTE has already been successfully used to test MySQL clusters and we think it could also be useful for other projects, such as XMMP or Squid, for example. We are extremely glad for being included in the Beautiful Testing to give more visibility to the project for a good cause."

More about Beautiful Testing
Beautiful Testing, edited by Tim Riley and Adam Goucher. Copyright 2010 O’Reilly Media, Inc., ISBN 978-0-596-15981-8. Available at: http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596159818/ All royalties from this book will be donated to the UN Foundation’s Nothing But Nets campaign.

More about ANSTE
ANSTE is a testing environment for advanced network services, mainly intended to automatize the integration tests of eBox Platform, furthermore it could be used to other similar purposes. ANSTE is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL) and the project's trac and source code are available at: http://anste.ebox-platform.com
 
« Last Edit: May 30, 2010, 08:40:47 pm by hvilppola »

hvilppola

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Re: eBox testing environment ANSTE one of O'Reilly's Beautiful Testing essays
« Reply #1 on: December 22, 2009, 11:21:44 pm »
Just a small update: The essay "Testing Network Services in Multimachine Scenarios" is now available for download (under Creative Commons license, by-attribution, non-commercial, share alike).

J. A. Calvo

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Re: eBox testing environment ANSTE one of O'Reilly's Beautiful Testing essays
« Reply #2 on: December 25, 2009, 02:49:20 pm »
Another update, just in case there is anyone interested in ANSTE, here: 0.7 version has been released!
« Last Edit: December 25, 2009, 03:01:52 pm by J. A. Calvo »
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poundjd

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J. A. Calvo,
     Very cool article, I loved it.

What are the specs of the ANSTE host that you use?
What are the "Other" systems that must exist around it to allow it to test?

Could ANSTE support and have you tried to run tests were the Master LDAP Server and the Slave LDAP servers have different UTC time - off by 5 minutes, off by 2 minutes,,,,,,, off by 5 sec, off by 2 sec,... off by 5 millisecond, off by 1 millisecond.... with large update and read volumes at the same time?  Would this be possible?  Might help address some of the issues with LDAP.

PS have you trademarked ANSTE?
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J. A. Calvo

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Hi, glad to hear you loved it ;)

The test machine I usually use has 16gb of RAM with tmpfs (so disk is not used for the tests) and Quad-core Intel Xeon. But I've also used less powerful hardware.

I don't understand your questions about the "other" systems.

Regarding LDAP, I haven't done that kind of tests with different time, but it's definitely possible to do it. You can define the test scripts you want and that can include execution of "date" commands. We use that for example to test the time period access in the proxy.
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poundjd

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J. A. Calvo,
    The "other" systems was a reference to any additional systems used to support ANSTE, like a server that kept images for loading, or such....
-jeff
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