Writing on Payments, AI and Delivery

Writing

Tutorials and practitioner essays on payments and lending, AI engineering and transformation, and delivery leadership and quality engineering.

Azure · 28 March 2023

What Test Automation Infrastructure on Azure Actually Costs

Where the money goes when you run test automation on Azure and Azure DevOps, with list prices for each piece and the changes that cut an example setup's bill by around 70%.

9 min read · Tutorial

Test Automation · 21 February 2023

Testing APIs Protected by Microsoft Entra ID with REST-Assured

Get Microsoft Entra ID access tokens in REST-Assured API tests with the client credentials flow, test authorization as well as functionality, and run it all in Azure Pipelines without storing a secret.

8 min read · Tutorial

Azure DevOps · 24 January 2023

Cutting UI Regression Time with Parallel Test Jobs in Azure Pipelines

Split a slow UI regression suite across several Azure Pipelines agents with a parallel job strategy, then merge the results back into one report.

7 min read · Tutorial

Test Automation · 27 December 2022

Testing SOAP WebServices using REST-Assured Library

REST-Assured has no native SOAPAction method. This article explores a method for using REST-Assured to send requests to SOAP services despite that limitation.

1 min read · Tutorial

Azure · 18 December 2022

Authentication for Azure REST APIs using Azure AD Service Principals

How to call Azure REST APIs by creating a Service Principal in Azure Active Directory and acquiring a Bearer token to authenticate, using the portal, Azure CLI, Postman and PowerShell.

5 min read · Tutorial

Test Automation · 8 December 2022

Handling Flaky Tests in Azure DevOps Pipelines

Detect, report and contain flaky automated tests in Azure DevOps with test reruns, flaky test management, Test Analytics and a quarantine, so a red pipeline means something again.

8 min read · Tutorial

Azure DevOps · 28 November 2022

Running UI Tests on a Self-Hosted Azure Pipelines Agent on an Azure VM

Set up an Azure VM as a self-hosted Azure Pipelines agent for browser-based UI tests, so they can reach internal test environments and run on a machine you control.

9 min read · Tutorial

Azure DevOps · 14 November 2022

Using Azure Key Vault Secrets in Test Automation Pipelines

Keep test credentials and API keys out of your test framework by storing them in Azure Key Vault and passing them to automated tests in Azure DevOps pipelines.

8 min read · Tutorial

Azure DevOps · 4 October 2022

Publishing ExtentReports and Cucumber Reports to Azure Static Web Apps

Publish ExtentReports and Cucumber HTML test reports to an Azure Static Web App at the end of every Azure DevOps test run, behind a sign-in, so anyone on the team can open them in a browser.

9 min read · Tutorial

Azure · 4 October 2022

Generalize an Azure Virtual Machine to create a VM Image

How to create a custom image from an Azure virtual machine so that new VMs can be spun up with all the required software ready to go.

8 min read · Tutorial