Cloud Time Travel Testing Automation Is Now Possible!

SANTA CLARA, CA. – March 23, 2020

The Challenge:

While our product, Time Machine has solved test automation issues for the past twenty-five years, we are committed to innovating and adapting to the ever-changing environment. In recent years, many companies have migrated to the cloud in order to conduct more efficient business. This has worked well for many; however test automation has remained an issue.

Extreme cloud time shift testing automation is incredibly challenging due to the dynamics of test systems and frequent creating/destroying of new virtual machines in the cloud. In the past, this caused delays since new license keys were required for each newly created server and manual intervention was needed to apply them (thus human error was possible.) Luckily for our customers, Time Machine has adapted and can now deliver cloud time shift testing automation through the use of cloud services (we chose Amazon Web Services – (AWS) to run our products demo).

The Solution: Time Machine and TM Product Suite:

Time Machine is now able to support floating license servers and has the ability to check licenses in or out of a license pool automatically. This means that licenses can be used without manual intervention, which allows uninterrupted automation and ultimately eliminates human errors from the process.

In addition, Time Machine Sync Server (TMSS) broadcasts a virtual clock to your test environments and it supports URL API for easy scripting to enable test automation.

In our current AWS demo, we highlight and demonstrate the top capabilities of our products. The demo only takes three minutes and is fully automated without any human intervention. The steps are as follows:

 1.     The script creates a new test instance (virtual server) in the cloud

2.      The new instance gets Time Machine license automatically from the Time Machine Floating License Server (TMFLS)

3.     The script uses URL API to update the sync group with a newly allocated test system identity

4.      URL API is used to time travel all the targets in the sync group

5.      The Selenium test cases run

6.      Your results are reported.

7.      The test instance is destroyed.

After three minutes, the test system life terminates, and the license returns to the pool where other Time Machine systems can utilize it. It’s that simple, and with this innovation, test automation in the cloud is no longer an issue.

This AWS Cloud test automation demo script is quite critical and practical for Agile/DevOPS/CI/CD.  With Continuous Integration of Agile paradigm, a source code submittal could automatically generate the release, then automatically move the release to a freshly created Cloud test environment, running the regression test and sending out the report, lastly spin down and destroy the test environment.  

How to achieve 100 percent automation with time shift testing embedded in the regression test is a huge challenge.  With Time Machine, Floating License Server, Sync Server API; we demonstrate that 100% test automation with time shift testing in the Cloud can be done today!

We’ll see you in the cloud!