rubygems.org & WAAT

With the recent problems the rubygems.org site is facing, you may not be able to get to the WAAT gem. In that case, you can also download the gem directly from the github repository. All information about WAAT can be found from my blog as before.

TaaS received pretty well in Pune conf

As mentioned in my earlier post, I spoke about TaaS - Test-as-a-Service in UNICOM's Next Generation Testing Conference in Pune on 23rd Jan. The talk went pretty well. Since this talk was for a slightly smaller duration, I had to use a scaled down version of the same slides that I used in the TaaS talk in Mumbai. The audio playback of the talk in Pune is available here.

There were a lot of interesting questions that came up this time:
1. Can I use TaaS to test in the cloud?
2. Can I use TaaS to do load / performance testing?
3. What are the security implications of using TaaS? 
4. Can I use TaaS to do mobile testing across different devices?

I will try to address these questions in subsequent posts.

Take a nap ... its good for you

... or so the research about "What Are the Facts About Naps?" says.

I particularly like #6.

So if someone finds me napping at work, I blame the article. :)

WAAT-Ruby crosses 1000 downloads on rubygems

Feeling very happy - the WAAT-ruby gem has crossed 1000 downloads from rubygems.org.

Taking video recordings of your test execution

I have always wanted to take video recordings of my test execution ... discard the video if the test passes, and save it if the test fails. 

Recently, I found that the headless gem does that for you. There is also some sample code to make the integration of this gem in your test framework very seamless.

While using the gem and its api's are very straightforward, this did not work very well for me.

Reasons:

1. I run my tests from various different types of machines / os, namely, mac, RHEL and Windows
2. The total number of machines I can run my tests from is huge (>20)  … mainly triggered via CI
3. The RHEL environment is controlled and configured by puppet.
4. There is a bunch of underlying library requirements for the video capture

So though it is easy to use the gem, it is not really easy to setup ALL test execution environments with these dependent libraries for this to work - at least for me.

Does anyone know of a better / easier solution?

Mac Air video problem? This may work for you

I have been using a Mac Air for some time now. One thing that has been a constant frustration for me on this machine is for some reason, the in-built camera stops working. For example, when I try to use Google Hangout or Skype, I get the error - "There is no camera connected". 

The System Profiler shows the camera is there.

Strangely, on restarting the machine, the camera starts working.

After lot of digging around, I found a post by "madams end" here which solved the problem for me.

The solution is: 

Go to Terminal.app and run the command:

sudo killall VDCAssistant

This fixed the problem for me.

The next thing I did was simply created a alias for this command in my shell - and then whenever I encounter the problem, just execute this alias.

TaaS (Test-as-a-Service) coming to Pune

2012 was a great year for me. I got the opportunity to share my learnings and open-source contributions in various conferences. 

2013 also seems to be starting off well. I will be talking in UNICOM's Next Generation Testing Conference, this time in Pune, on Wednesday, 23rd Jan. I will be repeating my talk from Mumbai on TaaS - Test-as-a-Service.