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.
Continue reading BDD Tools for Human Engagement and Test Purpose
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.
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.
Continue reading Automation Language Is Not (Necessarily) Your Development Language
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.
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.
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.
Previously I talked about testing like a gamer. So now let’s talk about the other side of that.
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.
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.”
Continue reading Good Tests vs Bad Tests with Description Languages
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.
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.
Continue reading Page Objects with Selenium and Cucumber JVM
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.
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.
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!
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.
Previously I had talked about valuing the “modern” tester as well as a possible defocusing of test practices. What a lot of these kinds of discussions swirl around is how much, and to what extent, testers are generalists or specialists. So let’s talk about that a bit.
Continue reading Testers as Generalists with Specialist Tendencies
If you look at the JavaScript test tool ecosystem, you will find it’s generally quite large. But you will see the same tool names pop up fairly regularly. The decisions actually fall along some fairly simple and standard lines. In this post I want to show you at least some of your choices and then apply those choices to testing against a web application.
Continue reading Writing Test Solutions with JavaScript: Testing Browser Apps
In this post, I want to cover using two particular libraries as part of the JavaScript testing ecosystem. I’ll be very briefly covering Mocha and Chai. I tend to use these quite a bit and will likely do so in future posts. This post will thus serve as a brief introduction to the tools along with a working example.
Continue reading Writing Test Solutions with JavaScript: Mocha and Chai
As many of my readers my know, or have figured out, I’ve been a fan of the Ruby language for quite some time and I’ve used it to construct some of my own open source testing solutions. I’m now actively pursuing JavaScript as my potential test ecosystem of choice. In a few upcoming posts, I’ll talk about this journey with practical examples. This first post starts things off by getting you up and running with a few possible JavaScript technologies.
Continue reading Writing Test Solutions with JavaScript: Starting Out
I talked about a particular test technique and how intuition can fail us. I’ve also talked a lot about testing and abstraction. But is there an intuition for abstraction? I’m thinking there is. And I’m thinking the better testers I’ve known have shown it. But I struggle with how to make this a useful concept in terms of building up this skill in testers.