Continuous acceptance tests for complex applications

So you’re developing a complex application. Maybe it has some really specific dependencies, or requires a lot of setup. In many cases (such as my own), it’s a web application. I have a suite of tests, varying all the way from unit tests through integration tests. The latter typically uses Selenium, and I often integrate it with Sauce Labs. I’ve written an article about this before. However, even those integration tests aren’t testing the real application: it’s not running against a production database, it’s not running with a production web server, and so on....

June 5, 2017 · 9 min · Kyle
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ROS production: create an Ubuntu Core image with our snap preinstalled [5/5]

UPDATE: I’m leaving this series up for historical purposes, but please note that I no longer recommend Ubuntu Core or snaps for use in robotics. This is the fifth (and final) blog post in this series about ROS production. In the previous post we created a gadget snap to allow confined access to the Turtlebot. In this post, we’re going to put all the pieces from this series together and create an Ubuntu Core image with our ROS snap preinstalled, ready to send to the factory for production....

May 4, 2017 · 7 min · Kyle
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ROS production: obtaining confined access to the Turtlebot [4/5]

UPDATE: I’m leaving this series up for historical purposes, but please note that I no longer recommend Ubuntu Core or snaps for use in robotics. This is the fourth blog post in this series about ROS production. In the previous post we created a snap of our prototype, and released it into the store. In this post, we’re going to work toward an Ubuntu Core image by creating what’s called a gadget snap....

April 26, 2017 · 7 min · Kyle
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ROS production: our prototype as a snap [3/5]

UPDATE: I’m leaving this series up for historical purposes, but please note that I no longer recommend Ubuntu Core or snaps for use in robotics. This is the third blog post in this series about ROS production. In the previous post we came up with a simple ROS prototype. In this post we’ll package that prototype as a snap. For justifications behind why we’re doing this, please see the first post in the series....

April 19, 2017 · 7 min · Kyle
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ROS production: our prototype [2/5]

UPDATE: I’m leaving this series up for historical purposes, but please note that I no longer recommend Ubuntu Core or snaps for use in robotics. This is the second blog post in this series about ROS production. In the previous post we discussed why Ubuntu Core was a good fit for production robotics. In this post we’ll be on classic Ubuntu, creating the example ROS prototype that we’ll use throughout the rest of the series as we work toward using Ubuntu Core....

April 12, 2017 · 6 min · Kyle