Challenges in scaling Quality Infrastructure

Submitted Mar 10, 2018

Section: Crisp Talk Technical level: Beginner

Maintaining Quality infrastructure in a distributed system is a challenge.
As a quality engineer, one must have come across situations where we have to:
Manage pre-conditions for our automated tests.
Build test data across multiple regions where application is deployed.
Quickly create automated tests in an independent fashion, when large team(s) share common resources.
Scale the automation, tooling & frameworks to support extreme parallelism in cleaner way.
Avoid human errors in testing frameworks.
Destroy and re-create test infrastructure quickly.
Efficiently utilize resources.
Put execution time to optimized use.
Consistently report the test results.
Reduce maintenance cost of your test infrastructure continuously.
Minimize human intervention in existing infrastructure to reduce test failures.

We, at Sumologic, faced similar situations when we started automation for our application. In this talk, we will talk about how one can work on these challenges using open source tools. Like,
Managing test infrastructure as code using Terraform. This helps moving away from manual infrastructure management.
Achieving parallelism in UI tests by running them on a selenium hub managed in Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS).
Automating creation of test data which takes care of full updates and partial updates.