Quality Assured?

When in doubt, just nest it two subdirectories down.

[questionablyassured]

"The Bamboo plan and scripts for running the tests and generating an e-mail report are already done - you just need to get the application working... And also the tests."

I got the application and the tests working... but the scripts for running the tests and producing a report don't work either, so looks like I have to fix those too. I really don't think I'm asking for too much when I want the one thing that I'm told works to actually work?

[questionablyassured]

Several days later and late on a Friday night, I'm done refactoring the shell scripts and Bamboo plan so it really does work - and it pulls an e-mail list from Bamboo so we don't need to hardcode it on the server.

[questionablyassured]

"The Bamboo plan and scripts for running the tests and generating an e-mail report are already done - you just need to get the application working... And also the tests."

I got the application and the tests working... but the scripts for running the tests and producing a report don't work either, so looks like I have to fix those too. I really don't think I'm asking for too much when I want the one thing that I'm told works to actually work?

[questionablyassured]

How do you stop your employees from pasting secrets on the internet?

By putting Carbon Black and Symantec on their computers to cripple their CPUs so they can't copy/paste anything anywhere.

[questionablyassured]

How many devs does it take to fix a classpath?

At least 3. One to assert that I must be doing something wrong, one to help me troubleshoot so I can tell the first dev it's a classpath error, and a third one to also say it's a classpath issue because dev #1 still doesn't believe me.

[questionablyassured]

Update: at least 4.

[questionablyassured]

How many devs does it take to fix a classpath?

At least 3. One to assert that I must be doing something wrong, one to help me troubleshoot so I can tell the first dev it's a classpath error, and a third one to also say it's a classpath issue because dev #1 still doesn't believe me.

[questionablyassured]

report/deploy/app_tests.ini

So a few months back, I got loaned out to a QA team to help out with a big project that requires coordinating across a bunch of teams - and consequently testing a bunch of different applications that may or may not actually work together directly. Trying to make the best of the situation, I requested access to the new team’s Git repos and started cloning them to try to look at their existing test cases to get an understanding of what the apps do. This is going just fine until I get to the Cheetah* team’s repo, where I find a file path that is so long, Git will not let me pull the file. It’s just a text file, but it’s somehow bizarrely nested in 30 subdirectories that are named in an alternating fashion.

(This is obviously not an actual screenshot from my work laptop - it is merely an illustration of the ridiculousness of this file’s path.)

Flash forward a week. While digging through the Cheetah team’s documentation on Confluence to find anything useful (because of course no one pointed me in the right direction), I found their developer setup guide. The most curious thing I found on this page was a note about a Git command to make pulling very long file paths/names possible. I remembered that insanely long file path and laugh sighed. Then I forgot about it...

Flash forward 4 months. A senior dev who normally works on the Cheetah team and who has similarly been sort of loaned out to help with this big project has been helping me set up a Jenkins Pipeline to deploy an app and run regression tests. Let’s call this dev “Josh” and let’s call this app “DC.” I haven’t had a single clean run of this Pipeline since Josh handed it over a few weeks back. It’s been frustrating, but I’m getting to a point where I’ve seen most of the errors that can occur... and then I get a new more different error: /report/deploy/app_tests.ini is not a valid defaults path. I ask Josh if he’s seen this error before and he tells me that I may have to move the app_tests.ini to a different directory because it might be that the framework doesn’t like that there are two ini files in the same directory (test_report.ini also lives in that same directory). So he tells me to move it:

report/deploy/report/deploy/app_tests.ini

And change the Ansible playbook accordingly.

So, two things:

1. The app I normally do QA for has several ini files in the same directory all the time. This should not be a problem.

2. If there’s one thing I’ve learned so far, it’s that 99% of the time you get an exception on a file/path, it’s because you’ve spelled the file name/path wrong, specified the wrong name/path, or the target file just isn’t there.

This was a case of “the target file just isn’t there” - because the parent directory of report/deploy was actually missing from the jar file. As I reported my findings to Josh, suddenly the vision of that ridiculous file path flashed into my memory. And this is how I learned the standard procedure on Cheetah team is that if it at first it doesn’t succeed, just nest it two directories down.

*Not the actual team name obviously.