Last Saturday, I attended my first monthly meet-up hosted by the Testing Camp in Timisoara. This session placed special emphasis on Go.CD and Docker, while aiming at introducing the topic to those of us who are yet unfamiliar with such tools or frameworks. Since I’ve mainly focused on Manual Testing so far, I was eager to get a taster of what Automation is all about, especially in the context of Continuous Delivery. So I packed my laptop and went to join the fellow Meeples who had registered for the session, delivered by Alina Ionescu and facilitated by Camil Bradea, Iulian Benea and Ecaterina Ganenco.
In order to assist us in this process, Alina informed us in advance about the tools we needed to install on our computers, prior to the meet-up. During the actual session, she also provided a step-by-step guideline for us to rely on while creating our testing environment. Once receiving the instructions, we paired up and started working on our assignment. It was quite challenging to navigate our way via the Terminal by typing and executing text-based commands, but it was all the more satisfactory when the steps started rendering results. Whenever we seemed to get side-tracked by an error message or some other type of constraint, we exchanged views with other teams or received support from the facilitators, who mingled and tackled as many questions as possible. By the end of the meet-up, I was thrilled to have set up my own GitHub account and to have performed my first Commit and Push. Creating the necessary stages and jobs was equally rewarding.
Most of the participants managed to run an automated test on their machine within the allotted time frame. Even those who had only succeeded in passing some of the stages, simply resolved to try again at home, since we could all just revisit the steps in the guideline that Alina had provided at the beginning of the session.
To sum this whole experience up, I’ll just leave you with my “Lessons Learned”:
