With our strong focus on Engineering productivity, we continue to provide Mendix product development teams with tools, practices and support to be productive while maintaining and increasing high quality standards. Our next step in accomplishing that mission is the release of ATS 2, reducing the time from concept to deliverable even more. A new look, a new architecture, lightning fast test execution and focus on a user-friendly experience. Now available 'as a service'.
Facelift
One of the first things that you will notice when opening ATS 2 is a new style. Well, new... More and more we want our add-ons to integrate with the Mendix platform. We provide a seamless experience by implementing a familiar face and a familiar UX, similar to the Mendix Cloud Portal: http://home.mendix.com. And with that, as soon as you open http://ats.mendix.com you will be automatically signed in with your Mendix ID.
When restyling the app, we couldn't resist rethinking the navigability and structure of the app. Thus (and thank you all for your feedback), we redesigned the most important screens.
Test execution at the speed of light
Developing ATS 2 again emphasized the importance of refactoring your code every once in a while. In fact, we ended up with a brand new and completely rebuild test runner. The test runner in ATS handles interpreting and executing test cases, test suites and actions. And in ATS 2 the test runner is fast. Lightning fast. Numbers show an impressive increase of 100% and more. But seeing is believing, so take a look at the next video to see it yourself.
Another feature in ATS 2 that can speed up the duration of your tests is parallel test execution. And to be honest, such a feature was already available in previous versions, but now without the need for a manual setup. An improved version can now retrieve the supported concurrency level from your Selenium provider and will scale accordingly.
Continuous integration and deployment
A continuous integration and deployment pipeline (CI/CD) can save you a ton of manual deployment work. With the combination of the build API, the Deploy API and the Team Server API you could already come a long way. And with the release of ATS 2, also a new API is introduced: The Test API. The Test API enables you to add continuous testing to your CI/CD pipeline. An easy to use API to run your automated tests from any external tool, extending the CI/CD possibilities for Mendix applications. This allows you to run your automated tests as early as possible, preventing failures from moving any further downstream in your pipeline.
Test case dependency
When creating test suites, it is strongly recommended to not create dependencies between test cases. That is, letting test cases depend on the result of previous test cases. There are various reasons for this, such as:
- It makes it impossible to run test cases individually.
- It makes it impossible to run test cases in a different order.
- It makes debugging difficult (as a fault can be the result of a problem in a different test case than the one failing).
- There are no good and explicit ways to declare dependencies, so it can be difficult to see and understand these in test suite code and in test logs.
- Extending, restructuring, and maintaining test suites with test case dependencies is difficult.
However, we know that sometimes it's pretty hard to circumvent this, so we've introduced a new setting for test suites. With this setting enabled, you no longer need to give up the benefits of concurrency. Simply combine test suites and control whether the content of your test suite is executed in parallel or sequentially. Create a structure to fit your needs and run your tests as efficient as possible. Talking about productivity!
Get this release
Because you will love it. Contact your Mendix Account Executive or Mendix Customer Success Manager to get you onboarded.
For more information about ATS 2, please look at the ATS 2 release notes on https://docs.mendix.com/releasenotes/ats/2
We made Engineering productivity our job and there is much more to come, stay tuned!
