Developing and executing using a VM

[Cormac Flood]

Hi,

We have some manual testers that we are introducing to automation. We use OSX+Cucumber+Appium+Ruby.

The manual testers first sit a Ruby course and if they are any good they get to automate some Gherkin test cases. We have built all the Support parts of the framework and assist them with anything tricky.

The biggest challenge is getting the framework to work on their machines. They are reasonably technical but installing the required tools (and in the right order) can cause problems. Often, they make a change to their local machine and it causes issues.

To prevent this, I would love to have them simply using a VM with everything they need on it. Any problems, they can just spin up a new VM. Has anyone managed to do this? What are the implications for (for example) svn or any other tools that require user accounts? I've never used VMs for this before as to this point I've either been the sole developer in test or worked with automation developers who are are pretty technical.

Thanks in advance!

[80Vikram]

Hey Cormac,

VM is last decade technology. Your team should use docker container

https://github.com/appium/appium-docker-android

I personally use Docker containers for parallel execution with Selenium Grid and found it cheap, effective solution.

Hope it helps your team as well.

Regards,
Vikram