"LISA is the home of ops people who do ops correctly. I’m always motivated by the conference content and hallway conversations to be better, and I take home the knowledge needed to move closer to that goal. "
Tony Del Porto, Cisco Systems, Inc.
"This was my first LISA. It was great attending a conference that focused on my role without trying to shoehorn every challenge into a specific vendor's solution. The same mix of awesome sessions, speakers, and other attendees will bring me back every year."
LISA14 Attendee
"LISA is the best mix of training, talks, and networking of any events I've been to. That's the reason I've been to 11 of them.”
LISA14 Attendee
"I like seeing where the industry is heading, how SysAdmins/engineers are evolving, tools they are using, common problems and solutions across the world."
LISA14 Attendee
"No matter if you are dealing with the latest tech or trying to maintain something from the dark ages of the ‘90s, there are people at LISA who are experienced with it. Heck, many of the people who _developed_ this tech attend. This is a great place to get answers and ideas."
Lee Damon, University of Washington
"In a world where technology changes rapidly, it's hard to find great resources for in-depth expertise. LISA has a terrific combination of people who create the technology and people who implement it effectively for their companies."
Matt Simmons, Northeastern University
"If you're a sysadmin slaving away in a metaphorical basement and re-inventing the wheel every time your employer's business goals change slightly, LISA will help pull you into the light."
Marc Chiarini, Long-Time IT Admin and Researcher, MarkLogic Corp
"Great sessions, great presenters, great community. I feel like I can make up a year of following news and forums on the subject in a week."
This tutorial will focus on how to incorporate testing into the software that sysadmins develop. Programs typically written by sysadmins tend to be less amenable to testing for a variety of reasons: choice of language, lack of "OO-ness," and heavy interaction with "system programs" (things like "mount" and "df"). This class will address these issues and show ways to incorporate testing into existing programs without having to rewrite them; it will also demonstrate how to use testing when developing new programs when "going OO" isn't an option. The session will consist of lecture, discussion, and hands-on exercises.
Who should attend:
System administrators of any level with at least some experience writing programs in pretty much any scripting language language (Python, Ruby, Perl, Bash, or Groovy).
Take back to work:
An understanding of software testing and test-driven development, and how to incorporate these concepts into system administration
Suggestions for making future programs more testable
Exposure to a testing framework (Maven plus Spock)
