Encouraging automated tests for code-to-container delivery

Abstract

This thesis work is being performed in collaboration with Yolean, a company developing solutions for project and site management, using Kubernetes and microservices. Automation testing is popular and widely used in microservices development to ease the work for developers. However, Yolean has found automation testing less attractive due to the amount of noise it generates when tests are performed, for example, on microservices with partial health. The aim of this project is to further develop the test suit to ease test-management and ensure that tests produce relevant data. In this project, the Kubernetes structure and the development environment was built upon Yoleans public platform Ystack. Through the use of this platform as well as regular communication with Yolean about the user experience within Ystack issues were being presented and prioritised. The approach to solve these issues was to research, find and develop improvements to them, which were then presented to developers at Yolean. Through user experience and their feedback it was decided to either keep the solution as it is, further improve the solution, or remove it. Our findings suggest that there are further strong improvements to be made in order to encourage automated tests. The resulting solutions developed in this project was a timeout to kill tests that are running indefinitely to prevent database clogging, stop tests after they have passed a set amount of times, and add a delay to starting testing to reduce startup failing test data.