Engineering
Engineering has always been of enormous importance to Sixt, and we strive to excel in it every day. Articles in this category describe advanced engineering principles, fascinating research and learnings made at Sixt, and general best practices for software development. This includes the software development lifecycle, architecture, coding, and more.
How to run mobile tests in parallel using Appium?
In recent years there has been increase in the growth of mobile applications across different business verticals. Most organizations are targeting to convert their user base into app users and as such there is an increase in mobile app development across platforms with android and iOS being the most popular choice.
With this increasing trend of mobile application development comes the bigger challenge of testing the mobile app to cover all customer scenarios as well as business use cases. Testing a mobile app poses its own set of challenges some of the common ones being:
- Testing on various models and various versions of the OSes to ensure the app is working correctly on all supported platforms and devices
- Frequent release cycles which demands such a testing is repeated very often
Elasticsearch Rollover Index — Automated way to get rid of old timeseries based data
In today’s world, applications and services churn out a huge amount of data continuously. And if you’re dealing with time-series data like logs or audit data points then you need to consider how to get rid of it after it becomes old and unwanted. The best way to achieve this is using Elasticsearch Rollover Index.
What is a Rollover Index?
When a new Elasticsearch index is created automatically for write operations as soon as the previous one becomes passive, it’s called a rollover index.
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Only the newly created index will be available for write operations and the older indices will become read-only. All these indices have to be under one alias so as to allow the user to read and write on the same Elasticsearch alias without worrying about handling multiple indices.A technique to achieve test automation within the sprint
In my experience, most of the QA teams won’t attempt to create automation scripts for the features within the same sprint in which they build/develop, and these two activities (creating the feature and automating them) together can easily expand beyond the sprint life cycle.
First of all, we need to understand why we need in-sprint automation. This will introduce risk as well as technical debt. Any functional testing done within the life cycle of the sprint usually focuses on the feature story itself and not on complete regression of other parts of the product. The automation task for the current sprint features goes to the backlog or for future sprints.
And, thanks to in-sprint automation, we can easily end all of the preceding points. The benefits are:
⁃ Most of the time, the development processes get delayed due to the time the QA team needs for testing. A feature needs to be tested along with others to ensure seamless integration. With the help of In-Sprint automation, we can save time and ensure there are no leftovers or backlogs for the current sprint.
⁃ With Insprint automation, we can ensure the business can achieve their development goals in the first build and the ongoing adjustments will require less time since there are no repeat processes involved.
read moreAutomatic dependency updates with Dependabot
As the project grows, the number of dependencies used in the project grows too. It’s very crucial to maintain them to have a state-of-the-art product. There is no way in Android Studio that can manage these updates for us. You have to do it manually. Usually, the process involves checking if a new dependency version is available, checking what’s new or reading changelogs, and then bumping the version and creating a PR.
We were doing exactly the same. It was a tedious task for us. That’s when I decided to automate this process. During research I got to know about Dependabot - version update system. This article is about how to automate dependency updates using Dependabot and how to handle its limitations.
read moreGolang's Atomic
Golang is a language which excels at parallelism, with spinning up new goroutines being as easy as typing “go”. As you find yourself building more and more complex systems, it becomes exceedingly important to properly protect access to shared resources in order to prevent race conditions. Such resources might include configuration which can be updated on-the-fly (e.g. feature flags), internal states (e.g. circuit breaker state), and more.
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