[Wtr-general] Beep for intervention?

[Charley Baker]

Sorry if I came across a little too harsh, I'm blaming the heat, it's been
90s here for the past week. :) Maybe I'll try to actually be helpful now
that I've fallen off my high horse and knocked my head. If your lag time for
server cert acceptance is as much as 24 hours and variable within that, you
might want to send mail as opposed to beeping, something along the lines of
this:

require 'net/smtp'

myMessage = <<END_OF_MESSAGE
From: My Server<server1 at foobar.com>
To: Michael Moore <mmoore at foobar.com>
Subject: Cert Ready

Certificate authenticated, ready for review
END_OF_MESSAGE

Net::SMTP.start('mail.server.whatever', 25, 'server1.foobar.com, 'username',
'password', :login) do |smtp|
  smtp.send_message myMessage, 'server1.foobar.com', 'mmoore at foobar.com'
end

For the VSTS builds, it's been a couple of years since I've used VS, and
that was Win32 api programming and cgis with C++, some C. There is a wrapper
for Watir scripts that I briefly looked at, gives you the ability to run
Watir tests through Nant, so you should be able to get more of a continuous
integration environment:
http://dustin.homestead.com/files/blogs/2006/02/integrating-watir-into-nant-and-nunit.html
It looks pretty slick, worth investigating if you're using VSTS.

-Charley

On 6/5/06, Michael Moore <stuporglue at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > I'd say like this seems like a really bad idea, automation code smells.
> Why
> > do you need human intervention? While it's possible to beep, pause,
> throw up
> > a dialog, whatever else, while waiting for people to interact with the
> > environment, it doesn't really make for automated tests that can run
> with a
> > build process. What can't you automate, why the human interaction?
>
> It's an app that lets an admin manage SSL certs. Depending on the
> server,  the certificate authority used the time for the cert to
> complete all of it's status codes in our product can range from as
> little as 15 minutes, to 24 hours. There's also a feature where you
> can have a user need to approval the installation of the generated
> cert onto the server (ie. one admin can generate the cert, but some
> other server admin has final say if the cert gets put on his server.).
>
> The specific part  I'm working on right now is this approval process.
> Since the cert can potentially take 24 hours to reach the approval
> stage, I'd rather not loop. Instead, I'll notify the tester (usually
> myself) that the script is done, at which point I'll know to keep an
> eye on the error logs to see if the cert is just being slow, or if
> it's failing.
>
> > environment, it doesn't really make for automated tests that can run
> with a
> > build process.
>
> Sadly my company is using Visual Studio Team Server, and I haven't
> found a way to easily kick off Watir test scripts when VSTS finnishes
> a build, and no easy way to get the results back into VSTS.
> Supposedly it's possible by integrating it with NUnit or something
> like that, but I haven't taken the time to work out exactly how that
> would work.
>
> Even without the VSTS integration, Watir was the absolute best testing
> program I found though. It was the only one I tried that would
> accurately trigger the javascript events on all the links, checkboxes,
> drop downs, etc.
>
> Hope that makes some sense,
> --
> Michael Moore
>
>
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