I’m going to continue introducing Symbiont in this post. In this post I’ll focus on the various ways that a script can be constructed.
Author: Jeff Nyman
Anything I put here is an approximation of the truth. You're getting a particular view of myself ... and it's the view I'm choosing to present to you. If you've never met me before in person, please realize I'm not the same in person as I am in writing. That's because I can only put part of myself down into words.
If you have met me before in person then I'd ask you to consider that the view you've formed that way and the view you come to by reading what I say here may, in fact, both be true. I'd advise that you not automatically discard either viewpoint when they conflict or accept either as truth when they agree.
Along Came a Symbiont, Part 1
I’ve talked about my automated testing framework Symbiont in a variety of posts. Because it’s been used in a variety of locations, I’m going to use this post to do a gentle introduction to the framework in a slightly different way than I have previously.
The Art of Attention to Detail in Exploratory Testing
Testers must have the ability to utilize exploratory testing as well as scripted testing. But exploratory testing is actually not the entirely free-form exercise that some people associate it with. So let’s talk about that.
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WebDriver in JavaScript with Promises
As a tester wanting to write test tools in the JavaScript context, you have to get used to the concepts of callbacks and promises. This is one area that is very different from other programming languages when considering automation. So let’s talk a bit about that.
JavaScript with Selenium WebDriver and Mocha
I talked previously about using Selenium WebDriver in the context of JavaScript. There I used Jasmine as a test runner for Selenium. Here I want to expand on this by using the arguably more popular Mocha as well as get into more depth on automation construction.
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BDD Tools for Human Engagement and Test Purpose
Awhile back I wrote up some context around the question of Is Cucumber Truly Misunderstood?. There is a wider concept here that makes these tools quite applicable in the modern testing context, so I want to cover that here.
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The BDD Lure and Trap
The whole notion of BDD is something I’ve talked about in a series of posts. I recently did an exercise with a group of business users, testers, and developers. We used a contrived example but the example was certainly a realistic portrayal of the activities that tend to occur on “real” projects. So let’s talk about that.
Automation Language Is Not (Necessarily) Your Development Language
Way too many companies out there have this notion that testers must use the language that their applications are written in. So if your company writes an application in Java, that’s what the testing solutions should be written in. This is laughably wrong and completely short-sighted. It’s what you tend to get when development managers are responsible for building up test teams or when you have test teams that have to rely on others to do their work (and their thinking) for them.
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Symbiont Now Supports Capybara
Since its inception my Symbiont framework has provided a wrapper for Watir WebDriver, which in turn provides a wrapper for Selenium WebDriver. One of the other major libraries out there that wraps Selenium is called Capybara. I wanted to see what kind of support I could provide for that. In this post I’ll cover these changes.
Automation is a Technique, Not Testing
Marshall McLuhan said “We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.” Anyone who seeks excellence in the testing craft must struggle with the appropriate role of tools. For testers this shows through no better than when dealing with automation.
Being (and Hiring) A Test Specialist
I’ve previously talked about being a generalist with specialist tendencies. I’ve said I’ve generalized in just about everything but I’ve tried to specialize in quality assurance and testing as disciplines. But what does that actually mean? Let’s talk about that.
Gaming Like a Tester
Previously I talked about testing like a gamer. So now let’s talk about the other side of that.
C# and Selenium on Xamarin
A lot of testers avoid any consideration of C# because it’s a Microsoft created language and the assumption is that it only has relevance on Windows. That’s not true. Just as Java learned a lot (and corrected a lot) from C and C++, C# did something similar with Java. Here I want to focus on how you can use C# on other platforms by creating a test solution in Xamarin.
Good Tests vs Bad Tests with Description Languages
I’ve talked about “being lucid” and using description languages before. I have a whole category here devoted to TDL (Test Description Language) and I’ve worked to present examples that are not your standard “shopping cart”. In this post, I’ll cover an example of how I helped testers go from a “bad test” to a “good test.”
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Using C# with Selenium WebDriver
In this post, I’ll focus on an ecosystem I haven’t given much attention: that of Windows and the use .NET related technologies. I’ll be covering the use of Selenium WebDriver within a C# context.
Page Objects with Selenium and Cucumber JVM
In this post I’ll focus on using page objects in a Selenium and Cucumber JVM context. Please note that this post follows on from the previous post, using the code you built up there.
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Using Cucumber JVM with Selenium WebDriver
I previously posted a tutorial on using Cucumber JVM to test Java code. However, many testers are in the position of using Cucumber JVM to test web-based applications using tools like Selenium. In this post I’ll show how to use these tool solutions together.
Testing with SauceLabs
If you are a tester and deal with automation, you will likely at some point have to run your tests on SauceLabs or some similar remote platform. In talking with some testers, this tends to make them a little nervous and I’ve found this comes down to them thinking it’s more difficult than it really is. So here I’ll cover how to do this with two popular automation libraries in Ruby and then I’ll show how to do the same thing using my Symbiont framework.
Symbiont Reaches 1.0!
My test micro-framework, Symbiont, has reached version 1.0. This means I have officially graduated from “show and tell” to “deliver … More Symbiont Reaches 1.0!
Tester Specialist, Technology Generalist
A way back I talked about testing focusing on its roots as a technical discipline. I’ve also talked about how companies should interview testers as testers and, most recently, a bit about being generalists with some areas of specialization. I often hear, usually from hiring managers, that what I talk about makes it very hard to hire testers in light of modern day realities. So let’s talk about that.