Enterprise Erfahrungen

[Brayan Jacobsen]

Ourarcgis enterprise portal 10.9.1 went down one after another within couple of weeks with this symptom below. Our landing page, information bar in the arcgis portal changed suddenly where we were no longer seeing the usual tabs. We could still sign in, as windows user and also as Initial Administartor Account, however the headers showed different things like Pricing etc, screen shot below.

When this happened in Dev environment, we thought it could be because the certificate had expired, but in test, it happened and the certificate has not expired yet. When this behaviour was seen in test, we reached out to esri support immediately and during troubleshooting, we stopped and rebooted the portal service and thats what broke the portal as the postgres was not able to start at all after that, same as what happened in our dev environment. java.exe and javaw.exe can't start, only portal process starts. But the symptom was our information banner on the home page/landing page suddenly updated without us doing anything.

2.Replace the file arcgisportal\content folder\properties.json file with a clean,syntax error free and uncorrupted file. Since we have portal primary and portal standby and also the portalconfig store is in a network shared folder, we had to update the file in both primary and stand by server and also in the shared network drive folder

3.Make sure to start the server that says is primary, give it sometime and start the other. don't start both primary and standby at the same time. I also had to stop and start the data store service as well.

i resolved this, i was reading a lot of suggestions of what all could potentially go wrong and luckily did the right thing based on all that i read. the properties.json file in the arcgisportal\content folder was corrupted and replaced that with a clean one. Before doing that, i stopped the portal service, replaced the corrupted file with new file and started back the portal service and gave it sometime to completely startup. i fixed the dev environment, but while doing the same steps in test, i am noticing that the properties file gets corrupted again as soon as i start the portal service, i updated in both places. any idea where this gets corrupted from?

If we just talk about web applications in the enterprise domain, today, more than 71% of big businesses have a website while 28% of these businesses are capable of transacting their business through an online medium. These numbers go as high as 83% when it comes to small enterprises that have started selling online.

Enterprise test automation has to consider multiple elements as they are big and require multiple technologies to work. For instance, multiple microservices are set up using Docker, and even the cloud infrastructure will have multiple cloud technologies attached to the machine. When enterprise test automation is conducted, all these components come into the picture which creates an extremely complex web for the tester. Hence, the team makes sure that individual components, integrated components, and the complete end-to-end flow of the application remain intact and work as expected.

Now the main aim of describing this list is to understand the scale at which an enterprise works. If we start exploring all the components of Netflix, we are set for a lot of surprises. However, a user is not so concerned about what happens behind the scenes. All they need is for the application to open quickly, search quickly, and play their selected video in the best format for their device, as soon as it is possible. This makes enterprise test automation a job with extraordinary responsibility.

Enterprises work with a ton of applications out of which some are third-party while many are their in-house projects. All of them connect together and work in synchronization to provide the correct output as expected from the application. In such a messy organization of critical components, it can be overwhelming to list the final tasks and goals expected from us as enterprise automation testers. To sort things out, we can list the high-level elements of enterprise test automation that can further help us refine these elements into sub-parts.

Critical features are explicitly visible and highly used in the application. They are of high priority and can stop the release of software if not found working correctly. In technical terms, we can say that these are high-risk features and can break production if faulty versions are pushed. Therefore, enterprise test automation should always ensure that critical features are included for automation. Also, testers working on enterprise test automation should keep in mind that something may not be critical today but with time and additions of more enhancements, it will become one definitely. So, keep updating the list and observing newer developments for better efficiency.

A lot of the features of an application ask for the data input from the end-user. For instance, on Netflix, the search bar takes multiple inputs and provides the video results in the output as per the location of the user. Testing these types of features is termed data-driven testing and is always recommended to be done through automation because of the amount of data involved. One input field may take hundreds of data points while testing to ensure the output given is correct, and validations also work fine.

Enterprise test automation is no exception, and here, too, the data-related tasks are required to be tested through automation, as manual data-driven testing is often error-prone due to repetitive tasks.

Enterprise test automation is the best option in this regard that can be run (even at night) to test the performance metrics for each line of code. This ensures that we never cross certain thresholds and provide the best performance to the end-user.

Disney Plus (another enterprise) crashed on the day of its launch due to heavy demand that they never anticipated. These types of events are often seen with many enterprises when they test the lower value of traffic than the actual number. This testing process is called load testing. In load testing, as the name suggests, the tester puts down the load on the system to test the breaking point. The enterprises keep it well above the number they have calculated however, the real world is full of surprises.

Enterprise test automation should include load testing because there are too many elements that take the load. When a lot of people start streaming the same video on Netflix, multiple elements are affected behind the scenes and each of them has different capacities to handle the load. Automation can analyze each of them multiple times, especially during the release to verify if the application is ready to handle the load or not.

While the enterprise app is a big software, each of them is built using individual components that all have to work perfectly to make the bigger software work smoothly. These individual units are, therefore, required to be tested each time any code is changed. This is done to restrict the area of impact such that we know exactly what part and what code caused the issue and it becomes extremely easy and quick to rectify the bug as well.

So what would happen if OpenConnect is working perfectly as an independent entity but fails to provide the content when integrated with other components on Netflix? Obviously, there is nothing wrong with the component here, but the communication part is broken. This makes us wonder about testing exactly this part and how different components are working together as one whole unit. This is termed as integration testing and this as well cannot be done manually. Enterprise test automation initiates this testing each time any component gets changed, and thousands of tests ensure that the whole unit works as ideally as possible.

Most of the things in enterprise software are worthy candidates to be considered for enterprise test automation. It saves a lot of time, and considering the size of an enterprise software, time is always short on each of the teams. However, there are a few things that should never go into automation as it can have a reverse effect on the testing process.

Secondly, tasks that are complex, data-related, or critical but will never be tested again in the future should be done manually. The whole point of test automation is to bring down the costs with respect to future runs. This goal is not accomplished when automation is done just once, and we end up consuming a lot more time than what we would have done through the manual path.

With these listed elements, it is important to note that enterprise test automation is a mandatory tool for business reputation. Enterprises are not generally short on money and have already made their user base so new feature pushes are also done slowly. The only thing they are concerned about is their reputation and to ensure that the application should work as intended in any scenario and on any device no matter how small a feature the user is using. Enterprise test automation makes sure that the end users always get a robust application and that testing is done in the shortest time possible.

Enterprise test automation is a herculean task. It involves a lot of elements, which can be hard to manage especially when we have so many things scattered at so many places. Therefore, working with enterprise test automation can be challenging in many ways; a few important ones are listed here:

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