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=trueWe’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.