With a myriad of tools to choose from—open source, free, paid, and enterprise level—teams and organizations have seemingly endless options. Making the right tool decisions can impact the level of quality and success within DevOps projects. Kellyn Pot'Vin-Gorman discusses different tools, what tools work best together, and how—even in teams that are in silos—the right choices can make the difference between success and failure in DevOps implementations. Explore tools—such as Ansible, Jenkins, Maven, Delphix, Github, Liquibase, and Terraform—for automating builds and virtualization. Review reasons for choosing open source, “freemium,” or enterprise tools along with different hybrid tool combinations and explore why companies face new challenges as DevOps tools mature.

The trend in mobile apps today is who can deliver the best and the most new apps as quickly as possible to keep up with the competition. With this, the need for more and better testing seems to grow exponentially. Open source Appium is a unique mobile app testing framework that allows you to write a single test which executes for native or hybrid apps on different operating systems running simulators/emulators and real devices in parallel. Harry Roberts describes how to create and implement a successful mobile testing strategy using Appium across Android and iOS devices. After discussing the basics of Appium and demonstrating it live, Harry outlines how you can determine when to run tests on emulators/simulators vs. real devices and which tools are most efficient and cost-effective.

To emulate production-like conditions that cannot be tested on the unit level, many integration and functional tests need a realistic environment. However, performing these tests in a production-like environment is fraught with problems—test data management issues, tests that are difficult to execute repeatedly, and network traffic that causes long-running test execution times. Instead of having to deal with these problems and others, Irene Dhong employs Docker to simulate dependencies. Learn how you can take advantage of Dockerized dependencies for quick test writing, reusability of common development code, and the ability to test early and often on a very low functional level. Irene describes how her development team is using Docker to implement more effective TDD and unit testing environments because Docker utilizes similar infrastructure both on the development and DevOps side. Join in to get Dockerized, too.

The combination of microservice architectures and continuous delivery (CD) create a difficult scenario for integration and release testing. Even though microservices often introduce a huge number of integrations and transitive dependencies, testing still must be completed quickly to keep the pipeline flowing smoothly. Robert Williams surveys the techniques and tools available today for testing one or more microservices against a mix of real and virtualized dependencies in various stages of the CD pipeline. He explores structured testing around multiple versions of those services and their dependencies. Robert demonstrates semantic versioning and a console for traffic shaping so you can specify a range of versions of microservice dependencies and automatically test the candidate service against a range of real or virtualized dependencies.