Shift-Left with CDAF Build Image. Building In Containers Many CI/CD orchestration tools support building in containers, e.g. GitLab & BitBucket Pipelines, for some of these tools, it is the only supported meethod, e.g. CircleCI & Travis. For these tools the CDAF images have been extended to provide a broad range of software development kits and command line utilities. Agent Containers Azure DevOps does not natively support building in containers, however, the Azure DevOps agent is installed on the CDAF Build Image, so one or more containers can be registered and run in Agent Pools or Deployment Groups.

Behavior-driven development in dependent pipelines. Status Quo It is very common for automated tests to be executed from a test developers desktop, namely because it has a browser and can render pages locally. To allow testing on a variety of platforms and browsers, BrowserStack is commonly used, which is great! However, this implies that the tests are being run from source, and are therefore volatile. Execution from a Pipeline With test execution being performed from source, it is a natural progression to use this same method in a pipeline.

Entering Sprint-0 To embed automation into the feature development lifecycle, a pipeline should exist at the earliest possible time, configured to initially “do nothing” at deploy time. Using the CDAF samples for Linux or Windows, an operational pipeline can be created quickly. Enough to make it run Install CDAF for Linux or Windows and seed your solution. At this point you have the bare minimum to produce an executable deployment artefact.