Category: Automation

Published inAutomationRSpecWatir

Automated Testing with Watir and RSpec, Part 2

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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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Published inAutomationRSpecWatir

Automated Testing with Watir and RSpec, Part 1

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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.

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Published inAutomationQTP

Show Some Class When Using QTP

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A lot of testers use QTP as a record-and-playback tool first and then add some logic to start building a framework around whatever their test scripts are. That’s an approach that can work but those same testers often don’t utilize one of the key strengths of QTP, which is it’s object-oriented structure.

Rather than treat it as obvious that using classes is a good idea and without giving a tutorial to object-oriented programming here, I plan to showcase some specifics to keep in mind when using a class-based approach in QTP as well as give a specific example of how this approach can be useful by showing how you can encapsulate your logic for better maintainability.

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Published inAutomationQTP

Modularizing Descriptive Programming in QTP

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In a previous post, I talked about how I prefer the choice of descriptive programming in terms of my QTP logic for recognizing objects. Descriptive Programming (DP) is a specific approach that QTP makes possible for constructing your recognition strings programmatically. Anyone who has had to modify SilkTest frame files or create XPath-based locators for Selenium will quickly realize that “descriptive programming” is really just a name that QTP has given to what many tools already make possible. In fact, it’s the Object Repository (OR) — the alternative approach in QTP — that tends to be a value-add of QTP beyond other tools, at least for some people.

In any event, my previous post was a little skimpy on specific details so here I’ll look at a specific example of modularizing some test logic using the descriptive approach in QTP.

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Published inAutomationQTP

Should I Ditch the Repository and Be Descriptive in QTP?

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QTP allows you to use what the tool calls Descriptive Programming (DP) as a way to write your automated test logic. This is really nothing more than a way of referencing objects, similar to the recognition method path (object strings) in Rational Robot, the GUI map strings of WinRunner, the tags and locators in SilkTest, or the selectors in Selenium. This style of object recognition is often put in opposition to another form that QTP allows you to do, which is store strings in the Object Repository (OR).

So which one should you use: DP or OR? Does it really make a difference? Are there advantages to one over the other? Can you use both? Should you? I’ll talk about all this a little here.

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Published inAutomationCapybaraCucumberSelenium

Testing with Cucumber, Capybara and Selenium

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In a prior post, I talked about using Capybara and Selenium as just a few among many tools. In a related post on using RSpec and Capybara, I brought up the possibility that “the natural language parts are, in fact, the executable code.” This was in reference to the idea of code logic expressed as natural language in RSpec but that still required actual code that sounded almost like the natural language statements. Wouldn’t it be nice if you didn’t have to write it twice? You just write it one way and then it executes? The argument then might be to just write the code, and assume the intent of the test can be explained via comments or something else. But many people really wanted to keep the focus on natural language tests.

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Published inAutomationCapybaraRSpec

Using RSpec and Capybara Without Rails

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Building off of my post regarding spiking automated testing solutions, one thing I didn’t really do was show you any sort of effective coding practice there at all. In that post I was showing how to get a series of technologies working together for that old “sense of accomplishment” thing. What I want to do here is focus on using two of those technologies together — specifically, Capybara and RSpec — while also showing you how you can start to separate out bits of logic as you start thinking about how to construct automated test frameworks for testing browser-based applications.

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Published inAutomationCapybaraRSpecSeleniumWatir

Spiking With Open Source Testing Tools

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If you are a tester that’s charged with automating the execution of a web application, there’s a fairly good chance that you won’t be using some of the cost solutions out there like QTP or SilkTest. There’s a better than even chance that you’ll be looking at open source testing solutions. If this is your first experience with such technologies, you might find it a bit daunting. Oftentimes the one thing you won’t find is a nice concise script that will at least give you a start. Complicating this is many blogs seem to indicate various tools all interconnect in some ways, or can only be used in certain contexts, leaving you to figure out a lot of the details yourself.

For me, when I look at these tools I need to know, as quickly as possible, if (1) they work at all and (2) if I can wrap my head around how to get started in the first place. Sometimes you just need a gentle nudge in the right direction to see how the technology works. When I practice with technologies, I create little “spike” files that do just enough to show me what I need to know. Here I’ll be showing you my spikes.

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