Customizing Checkbox Launcher to Invoke Your Own Checkbox Testing Process
Why customizing Checkbox launcher? By customizing your Checkbox launcher, you can invoke your own Checkbox testing process based on an pre-existing Checkbox Test Plan "on the fly", without packaging or prepare a Checkbox Provider prior to launch your Checkbox Test. This comes the name launcher to launch your custimized Checkbox testing process.
If we can customize Checkbox process "on the fly" in Jenkins job, it means that we can customize Checkbox process without touching development of Checkbox (and its corresponding "providers") at all. Thus making Jenkins highly flexible to manipulate Checkbox.
What can be customized in a Checkbox Launcher?
They are:
- format of testing results and reports (a "submission" in Checkbox terms), e.g. junit.xml, html, and tarball
- configuration and environment variables like iper server IP addresses, WiFi passwords ...etc.
- which Checkbox job I want to excludes from a (pre-defined) test plan.
- ...and more
Benifits in Jenkins?
By triggering different launcher, Jenkins can trigger Checkbox jobs in slightly differnt ways with the same or similar Jenkins templates.
I get used to testing my Jenkins jobs under development by triggering them in a row of smoke, no stress, less stress, and then finally the full run from the iteration time point of view. By shortening the iteration time, I can get feedback of the job itself earlier to help me debug a Jenkins job running Checkbox more effciently.
A typical smoke job simply takes a few seconds (deployment time excluded). A typical stress job can take the machine a few hours. By skipping (no stress) or reducing (less stress) the time of stress job, I can also focus on the other test jobs without waiting such long time.
This trick helps me create Jenkins jobs without too many complicated shell scripts to edit a plan test directly.