Automated Testing in CI/CD - A Continuous Integration Server Integration Primer

With the advent of Agile and DevOps practices, organizations of all sizes are adopting full continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) practices. However, as many groups have found out the hard way, you can’t achieve true CI/CD without automated testing. This is because testing has always been the biggest bottleneck in the pipeline, and while development velocity has increased, teams who are still doing manual testing are still experiencing slow release cycles.

So while QA and development teams work together to build reliable and scalable test automation, it is also crucial that the systems these teams use for testing are fully integrated into their CI server. This article provides an overview of the most popular CI servers in the market, and how they integrate with the Sauce Labs Continuous Testing Cloud.

Jenkins 

Jenkins is by far the most popular CI tool on the market today. A free and open source tool, it has a strong community following and enjoys broad adoption across companies of all sizes. To help you easily integrate your test execution into your Jenkins pipeline, Sauce Labs developed the Sauce Jenkins Plugin. While it isn’t necessary to integrate the two systems via this plugin (you could always build this yourself), there are number of helpful tools already built into this plugin:

1. It provides a user interface that lets you populate environment variables on the Jenkins server that can be used in your tests (for example, platform configurations, or your Sauce username and access key). Much of what the plugin does relates to the setting of environment variables.
2. It automatically launches Sauce Connect when you enable it for a project.
3. It handles reporting between Jenkins and Sauce.

Bamboo 

Atlassian Bamboo Server helps your team with continuous integration, deployment and delivery by providing tools that tie your automated builds, tests and releases together in a single workflow. Using the Sauce Labs plugin for Bamboo, you can easily configure projects to run tests on our Continuous Testing Cloud, manage environment variables, enable Sauce Connect Proxy, and provide test result files. All of this can be done directly from Bamboo, making your workflows more simple, and allowing you to focus on release better quality software, faster.

Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS)

VSTS is a cloud service for collaborating on code development and enables continuous delivery of applications. It provides a rich set of features, including Git repositories for source control, build and release management for CI/CD, test management and execution, agile tools for planning and tracking your work, etc. The Sauce Labs plugin for VSTS enables you to run Selenium tests in the CI/CD pipeline by allowing you to easily pass Sauce Labs authentication credentials, launch and stop Sauce Connect Proxy, and embed reports around the status of executed tests.