Tag: announcement

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New version released

We’re pleased to announce the release of a new version Conical. The main feature of this release is support for the manual testing functionality. This has been dogfooded internally and with a few beta testers for a while now and we think that it’s ready for wider use. This doesn’t mean that we don’t think that testing should be mostly automated but reflects our pragmatic belief that some testing (and evidence thereof) is vastly better than performing no testing unless perfection can be achieved.

Additionally, we’ve spent a lot of time and effort improving the overall UX for users. As part of this, we’ve tried to style all of the pages consistently and in a much more visually appealing fashion as well as going through all of the expected use-cases and ensuring that keyboard shortcuts (especially form submission) works as a user would expect. If you come across an area where the UX isn’t as expected, then please do get in touch and we’ll do our best to rectify.

We will add some more blog posts / FAQ pages on how the manual testing functionality can best be used shortly. In the meantime, you can download the new version and experiment.

Warnings

As part of this build, we’ve upgraded to .net 8. The DB driver for .net 8 can, depending on the SQL instance being connected to, complain about an untrusted certificate. If this is the case, then the connection string file will need to be updated to append the following:

;TrustServerCertificate=true

We’ve updated the 1st time installer to allow users to configure this flag, however, for existing installations, we do not automatically update the connection string. This means that if this flag is required, then the file must be manually updated. This can be done by editing the config file on the container instance (this is usually mounted as a volume).

If you need any assistance with this, then please get in touch and we can assist you.

New features

Alongside the manual testing functionality, lots of other functionality has been added, including:

Improvements / Bug fixes
  • Improved disc-space monitoring service
  • Improve UX for changing passwords
  • Fix bug when writing data using product aliases
  • Improved UX for admin users when inputting data
  • Ensure all buttons etc. are styled appropriately
  • Ensure all form like pieces of functionality behave like forms
  • Ensure all dialogs force keyboard focus to the appropriate controls on display
  • Improve log-in experience so users can login directly from any page
  • Ensure product cover images can be easily updated in the UI
  • Allow test run types to be renamed
  • Improvements to lightbox control so non-image additional files can be viewed without needing to download them
  • When logging in, user passwords are now passed via the body rather than the query string for better log security. Note that the old method will still work for backwards compatibility, but is no longer recommended.
Non-functional changes
  • Standardise tree component across all use-cases
  • Additional unit tests
  • Additional integration tests
  • Refactoring following static analysis of the codebase
  • Update internals to use Task<..> everywhere
  • Simplification of CSS to avoid duplication
  • Refactored admin pages to facilitate better testing
  • Updated to use .net 8

Summary

We’re really proud of the new version and hope that you will find the new features useful.

As usual, if you have any questions or queries about anything related to Conical or testing, then please do get in touch – contactus@conical.cloud

Happy testing.

Categories
blog

New version released

We’re pleased to announce that a new version of Conical is now available. This contains a few small technical as well as some more UX improvements.

Highlighting of flattened Json

The highlighting functionality from the results text display has been brought into the flattened results Json display. This should assist in interpreting test results.

Better 404 experience

When navigating to incorrect links, the experience is now slightly better.

Data deletion

A bug was discovered whereby data wasn’t always removed from disc when a test run or evidence set was deleted. This has been rectified.

Note that any data which was previously left dangling is unaffected by this change. We are adding a piece of functionality to make it easier to clean this data which will be available in a future version.

As usual, if you have any requests, suggestions or comments then please do get in touch.

Happy testing!

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New version released

We’re pleased to announce that a new version of Conical is now available. This comes with a range of UX improvements to make the tool more powerful. These changes include:

Results text / logs

When viewing these, the user can now apply filters to narrow down the range of rows which are displayed. This can be useful when a user is trying to find specific messages in the output. To further assist in this, users can choose to highlight rows which match their criteria. By using these 2 features, it should be simpler to hunt for the rows of interest.

Additionally, where the source data points are large, users can now use pagination to improve the responsiveness of the browser.

Results json

It’s now possible to flatten the results json and apply filters to the flattened data.

Improved UX for non-logged in users

Previously, when a non-logged in user clicked on a link, they were presented with an error screen. They were required to navigate to the profile page, log in and then click on the link again. To improve that experience, they can now log in directly from the error page.

Filtering

Filtering functionality has been added to audit trails and .net assembly information.

Additional files

Some tidying up has been made here to improve the consistency of experience across all usages of additional files.

As usual, if you have any requests, suggestions or comments then please do get in touch.

Happy testing!

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New version released

Although the blog has been quiet for the last couple of months, our keyboards have been anything but. We’ve been working with our clients to add additional features to simplify their processes and improve their ability to present testing results to their clients. These new features include.

UX improvements

A lot of small improvements have been made to the tool to improve its usability. We’re always keen on user feedback, so if there are any aspects of the tool which you think that we can improve, then please do let us know.

Lightboxes for media

As part of extending the tool to better facilitate UX testing, users can now take advantage of being able to see any additional files using a lightbox.

Product dashboards

Users can now upload multiple dashboards per product (as opposed to previously only being able to configure the front page). This functionality can be thought of as a ‘mini CMS for test results’ allowing users to create customised presentation of the data, typically a dashboard per release or CI pipeline. These dashboards can contain standard HTML alongside Conical specific widgets for accessing test data.

We are currently using them to allow our clients to present an overview of a release candidate’s testing status, thereby allowing their project owners to be able to see the status at a glance.

We currently have support for embedding searches alongside their results. Additional widgets will be added as user requirements become clearer. If you have suggestions or requirements for additional widgets which would be useful, then please do get in touch.

As usual, if you have any questions about Conical or how we can help you improve your build, test and release processes, then please do contact us – contactus@conical.cloud.

Happy testing

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New version released

We’ve been busy this last month helping our clients use Conical to improve their testing processes. We’ve got some cool new features coming out of this work will be announced and released shortly, but in the meantime, we’re pleased to announce a new version of Conical has been released.

This version has a few improvements, including:

  • Improvements to the UX in the admin section
  • improved user searching functionality
  • long tags fail gracefully (BadRequest) rather than a server error
  • server metrics – free space on mounted discs on linux now report the correct value

Additionally, we found a problem with product level aliases when combined with product level privileges. This has now been corrected and fixed.

If you would like us to assist you with your testing and release processes then do get in touch with us at services@conical.cloud. We can help all sizes and types of organisations and we relish a challenge!

As usual, any questions, suggestions or comments, please get in touch.

Happy testing.

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New version released

We’re pleased to announce a new version of Conical has been released.

This version has a few new features, the main ones being:

  • The internal storage of ‘creator’ for test run sets has been updated so that it reflects the current name of the user which uploaded the data rather than the name of the uploading user at the time that they uploaded data
  • Usernames can now contain ‘.’

Note this is the 1st version of Conical for which automated Selenium tests have been used as part of the release testing process. We will provide more details on how we use Selenium in future blog posts / updates. As part of this testing, we’ve also added a range of additional features to the book of work which’ll help other users to use Conical to help with their UI testing.

Happy testing

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New version released

We’re pleased to announce a new version of Conical has just been released.

Along with a few minor UI tweaks, the main feature of this release is the ability to specify adhoc XPATH queries when looking at results XML.

This simplifies the analysis of results where the user wishes to perform some quick querying on the data without needing to create a custom XSLT.

Note that this functionality doesn’t replace the more powerful XSLT transformation feature but should be seen as a quick investigation tool with the XSLT feature then being used when the requirements are more well known (remember that the XSLT functionality allows for parameterisation).

To use the feature, simply click on the search icon in the results XML tab and follow the prompts.

As usual, if you have any comments, feedback or suggestions, then please do get in touch.

Happy testing

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New version released

We’re pleased to announce that we’ve just released a new version of Conical. The major features are:

  • Ability to search both test run sets and evidence sets by tags through the UI
  • Ability to see the history of a test run
  • Improvements to the UI to stop reloading data

As usual, any comments, questions or feedback, then please do get in touch.

Happy testing

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Uploading unit test results

Although Conical has never been intended to replace existing unit test / CI workflow tools, it’s a fairly common for teams to have a series of what are actually integration or regression tests structured as unit tests (if only because it’s rather easy to do).

Obviously, in these circumstances, we would tend to advocate for having a more appropriate, specialised piece of software to handle the different requirements of these. However, we acknowledge that in a lot of circumstances, this might be overkill and as what we’re aiming to do is help you improve your testing at a reasonable cost rather than aim for a prohibitively expensive and unrealistic testing perfection, we’re pragmatic in how we can help people’s existing processes.

To that end, we’ve release a new tool to Nuget BorsukSoftware.Conical.Tools.TRXUploader (Source – GitHub). Full instructions on how to use the tool are provided on the GitHub page.

With this approach, it’s possible to use your existing testing processes etc. but report your results in a nicer, more accessible fashion and then to subsequently improve the generation process if this would be beneficial to your product.

Generating TRX files

To ‘refresh your memory’, it’s very easy to generate a trx file from the command line. Navigate to the directory containing your tests’ project file and run:

dotnet test -r ../testOutput --logger "trx;logfilename=output.trx"

This will generate a trx file in the output directory.

Installing the upload tool

The tool is packaged as a .net tool so you can follow the instructions on MSDN. In short:

  1. Create a tool manifest
  2. Install or update the tool
  3. Run the tool

Note that we would always recommend updating the tool as well in order to pick up the latest version of the tool.

These instructions expand into:

# Create manifest
dotnet new tool-manifest

# Install tool
dotnet tool install BorsukSoftware.Conical.Tools.TRXUploader

# Update tool
dotnet tool update BorsukSoftware.Conical.Tools.TRXUploader

# Run tool
dotnet tool run BorsukSoftware.Conical.Tools.TRXUploader \
  -server https://demo.conical.cloud \
  -product "myProduct" \
  -source "output.trx" \
  -token "noThisIsntOurToken" \
  -tag "local" \
  -tag "example" \
  -testRunType "Unit Test"
Viewing the results

When the results are uploaded to the Conical instance, they will be mapped as one unit test run to one Conical test run, with the tests being subsequently displayed grouped by name (. are treated as hierarchy separators).

The details from the trx file (e.g. the machine details, timings etc.) are uploaded as results XML with any logging output being stored as logs.

Future steps

If you have any suggestions as to how to improve the tool / make it easier to handle your use-case etc. then do get in touch, either with the contact us below or via GitHub.

Happy testing.

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blog

Evidence Sets Released

We’re pleased to announce that we’ve released a new version of Conical containing support for evidence sets. These allow users to be able to have a high level view of the state of their entire release candidate across multiple test run sets and products.

It’s taken a little bit more time than we had originally planned to “dot the ‘i’s and cross the ‘t’s”, but it’s definitely worth the wait. We updated the original implementation to remove the ability to mark tests as ‘pass after review’ (PAR) as the feedback we received was that having an immutable overview was rather useful in its own right. The PAR functionality will be coming soon within the general release approval functionality.

To make it easier to create evidence sets from the command line / CI pipeline, we’ve released a tool on nuget – link – to make it trivially easy to do so without needing to write any code.

We use this tool ourselves in our CI processes prior to release to create an evidence set representing all of the test material that is run against our final candidate docker image, i.e. we can see the whole results of all testing for that package in a single place so that we can be confident that what we’re releasing works.

To get started, simply download Conical and follow the installation instructions. And as always, if you have any requests / comments, please do get in touch with us and we’ll do our very best to help.

Happy testing