Who Tests the Testers? Making and Testing Pipelines
summary
Claim: pipeline changes can and should be tested before merge, and five concrete techniques are offered. The talk describes linters and GitLab validators, running pipelines pre-merge, local runners like GitLab CI local, simulators and a custom static tester CI test that snapshots rule diffs, and programmatic generation using GIP (GitLab-CI-Python). CI test and local tools reduce surprises but none fully replace end-to-end runs; each method has tradeoffs and the custom tooling proves useful but not complete.
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chapters (18)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:26What is a pipeline
- 3:53Pipeline basics
- 5:39GitLab CI configuration
- 7:05Rules and dependencies
- 9:11Pipeline failure causes
- 10:36Human errors in pipelines
- 12:46Testing testing infrastructure
- 13:29Techniques to test pipelines
- 14:32Linting CI files
- 17:21End-to-end pipeline testing
- 18:44Local pipeline testing
- 20:33Static analysis testing
- 22:42Generating pipelines with Python
- 26:17Pros and cons of generated pipelines
- 27:44Simplicity for reliability
- 28:06Resources and closing
- 28:55Q&A
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