One of the nice things about SilkTest was the use of a dereference operator. I was disappointed to see that QTP didn’t have that. Yet I found you could start to mimic some of the functionality with the Eval function and the Execute statement.
Month: October 2011
Can I Stress The Load On My Volume?
In my post “Can I Function Test My Units?”, I talked about how testers often promoted a misuse of the phrase “functional testing.” I’ve found the same thing happens with the phrase “performance testing.” What I’ve found is that many testers don’t realize that performance testing, just like functional testing, is a test approach. This means there are various testing techniques that you can apply to the approach. If testers don’t have this kind of focus, I believe that the purpose of performance testing can be lost.
Quality Assurance – Obviously
So it’s obvious we need quality assurance, right? Okay, it’s true that quality is a dynamic concept that is contextual and situational. And, in a way, you can never really know the “actual” quality of an application in some universal sense. This is partly because quality is a value judgment based on the eye of the beholder. And it’s probably true that quality is not open to some absolute definition. (Similar to how other abstract words like justice, beauty, democracy, and so on are not absolute concepts.) But still. We obviously need some way to assure this beast we call quality. We obviously need a team called Quality Assurance.
I mean, it’s obvious. Err … right?
The Art of Testing at Different Levels
Many testers entering the field get nervous when they consider the need to test at different levels of an application, particularly if that involves working with developers. Many testers will enter into environments that claim they are practicing Test-Driven Development (TDD) and/or Behavior-Driven Development (BDD). What I want to do here is show that this stuff isn’t really all that scary and it’s really not that arcane. Further, if you want to be competitive as a tester and continue to add value, it’s in your best interests to learn what it means to test at different levels.
Can I Function Test My Units?
Many testers will tell you that they eventually had to work with their development group to draw the line between unit testing and functional testing. This, of course, implies that there is some sort of a difference between the two. And, in fact, if you go by the literature — professional or otherwise — of the testing industry, there supposedly is a difference.
I’ve just never liked that fact because “functional” is such a broad term. To my way of thinking, unit testing is a form of functional testing. I think testers who use the term “functional” as a separating category within tests are stuck in an “old school” mode of thinking.
An Extended Parameters Mechanism for Procedures in QTP
A problem with VBScript is that it doesn’t allow you to have optional parameters in your procedures. This also means you can’t do function overloading. There are various ways to deal with this but many of them can lead to a maintenance problem and require you to change how your new (“extended”) procedures are called. Ideally, you don’t want to have to change how the function is called each time you extend it. So let’s look at a few ideas here.
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Is Quality Really Everyone’s Responsibility?
Who is “responsible” for quality? This is one of those interesting questions that on the surface of it seems really simple to answer depending upon your viewpoint … and yet the question itself hides a few thorny issues. In my experience, most people who claim they are part of a “Quality Assurance Team” are not aware of these issues and thus perpetuate a lot of false thinking regarding the question itself.
It’s very important to think about what this question actually implies. How this question is considered directly ties in with how we think about the notion of responsibility and about how we communicate that notion to others.
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What Makes Testing Complicated?
I think the question of what makes testing a complicated discipline is a good one. It’s one all testers should be able to answer about their profession and, further, answer in a way where the answer couldn’t be applied to just about any other profession. The problem I’ve found is the answers you get are usually simplistic. You’ll hear people say “miscommunication” or “unrealistic schedules.” Well, that’s great but miscommunication can make any profession difficult as can an unrealistic schedule or poor estimating. I bet day traders, doctors, police officers, lawyers, military strategists, nuclear power plant operators and so forth could make the same claim.
Surely we can do better than that, right?
Automated Testing with Watir and RSpec, Part 2
If you went through the first part of my experiential case study, you’ll know that I ended up creating a few tests that used Watir-WebDriver to execute logic against a web site. While I managed to get some output from those tests, it wasn’t the best looking output in terms of readability. Partly that was design, of course. After all, I could have made better output simply by considering how my tests should return success or failure information. Ideally, though, I would create some sort of modularized reporting functionality as part of my framework. This module would do nothing but handle the outputting of test results. That’s certainly a worthwhile thing to focus on, but you might also consider other solutions. As I mentioned at the close of the previous post, one such framework has already been written to handle this, which is RSpec.
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Automated Testing with Watir and RSpec, Part 1
Sometimes it can be hard to get started with open source automated testing. The documentation is usually on the bad side of horrible. Further, many of the tools were written by developers with a development focus in mind, which is different from those tools developed by testers. Even when you do find technical people that are able to describe how to use something well, the context for using the tool may not be what you are looking for. I certainly found this when I started out wanting to use Watir, WebDriver, and RSpec. You can spend a lot of time looking through various Wiki pages or blog posts to figure out the bits of information you need to eventually have a fully working solution.
And that can be really annoying. And yet here I am apparently offering yet another blog post covering the stuff. What I’m doing here is presenting the information I wish I had when I started out. I provide a little historical detail, a lot of implementation detail, and some reference information behind the implementation.
Continue reading Automated Testing with Watir and RSpec, Part 1