In the previous post in this series, I showed you how you can execute Capybara via its own session object, which means you did not have to incorporate any of the Capybara DSL into your own logic. Here I’ll do the exact opposite of that by showing you how to incorporate Capybara into your own particular logic. Then I’ll show how that segues nicely into fitting Capybara within different test runners.
Learning Capybara, Part 1
Capybara is rapidly becoming the go-to test tool of choice among Rubyists. I will NOT be covering this tool in the context of the Rails platform. A lot of people see the Ruby test ecosystem as existing largely to support Rails and that’s simply not true. It is true that Capybara, in particular, was forged in and around a set of tools that exist largely to support testing Rails applications. What I’ll show you here is any web application can be tested using Capybara.
Learning Node.js, Part 4
In this post I’ll take you through what some people consider the harder to learn aspects of JavaScript testing, which is incorporating a JavaScript test framework and applying it against your site. More and more testers are going to be coming up against these technologies and it never hurts to get some understanding.
Learning Node.js, Part 3
In prior posts I had you creating web apps/servers via very simple logic. Framework software provides infrastructure support that allows you to create all of that a lot more quickly. Here I’ll take a look at using Express with Node.js.
Learning Node.js, Part 2
Here I’ll continue the Node.js learning process by starting to construct a very simple server that will serve up static resources, like HTML pages.
Learning Node.js, Part 1
My goal here is to introduce others to Node.js by basically detailing how I have learned it. In this initial post, I’ll jump right into creating a simple app-as-a-server and use that as a springboard for learning other aspects of Node.js.
BDD Specs and Parameterizing Phrases
If you plan on using a BDD tool (like Cucumber, SpecFlow, Behat, etc) you are going to want to have some guidelines for how and to what extent you allow parameterized and conditionalized phrases. This is an area that I’ve found can become a rat’s nest of bad habits unless you establish early on how much and to what extent to use these features.
Functional Programming — Is There a Clarity Trade Off?
Developers, along with many Test Solution Developers, have to decide whether they want to jump on the functional programming bandwagon. I’m not here to extol the virtues of functional programming. What I am here to look at is something I hear particularly from many people, which is that functional programming tends to make programs less clear. This does have particularly relevance to me since I do like code with a high degree of clarity regarding its intention.
Continue reading Functional Programming — Is There a Clarity Trade Off?
Grunting Your Way Into JavaScript
A challenge testers sometimes have, particularly those working to build up their technical skill set, is how to get involved in various programming language ecosystems. Often people start by trying to learn the language and I’ve found that’s not the most helpful approach for some. Sometimes you are better off starting with supporting tools, which forces you to use other supporting tools. Along the way you learn bits of the language in context. Then you can go back and learn the language in a more reference style. I’ll show what I mean here with using Grunt as a springboard to getting into the JavaScript ecosystem.
There Is No “Non-Functional”
I keep running into testers, and others, who like to categorize testing into functional and non-functional aspects. This needs to stop, in my humble opinion.
The Actions of Inform 7
In this post I’m going to be focusing on the actions that a player will take with an Inform 7 game. Those actions can be interefered with in various ways to make the game play experience more dynamic. All of this will be done using rules, which I covered in the previous post. In this post, you will see how actions are essentially a descriptive circumstance provided to a rule. When that circumstance applies — meaning, when the action has occurred — then interesting things can be made to happen.
Interview “Technical” Testers for Broad Skills
I recently did an interview for a “technical testing” position and it was one where they had you do a whole lot of exercises for coding. In fact, as far as I could tell, that’s pretty much what all the interviews were going to be. The interview was thus, to me, largely a waste of time. I actually told the interviewers that and, to be fair to them, they were quite gracious, did engage me in discussion, and actually seemed to agree with me on a few points. But here I want to talk about why I felt the interview was a waste of time and what role “coding exercises” have when hiring so-called “technical testers.”
Continue reading Interview “Technical” Testers for Broad Skills
Evolving Automation with Symbiont
Symbiont is my open source test framework, distributed under the MIT license. This post will provide a quick tutorial on how you can evolve your script from a pure watir-webdriver implementation to one that is driven by Symbiont.
The Rules of Inform 7
In this post, I’ll continue on the exploration of Inform 7 that I started in the introductory post. Here I’ll continue to add to the game source text started in that post, putting emphasis on rules. Rules are one of the keys aspects — the other being actions — of how Inform 7 allows authors to interact with their game players.
Introduction to Inform 7
In a series of posts, I’ll be writing about a gaming system I’ve been using to teach children writing skills but have also found helps testers with analysis and thinking skills. This particular gaming system is called Inform 7 and it’s used to program interactive fiction games, which used to be called “text adventures” back in the day. Inform 7 offers some unique challenges to thinking, writing, and programming such that I’ve found it to be an excellent system to explore with. Given that Inform 7 is used to create games that present puzzles to be solved, it’s been instructive for me to treat Inform 7 itself as a puzzle to be solved.
An Introduction to Using Cucumber-JVM
A lot of testers I run into learn Cucumber on Ruby. This tends to be a very easy path since the overhead on a dynamic language like Ruby is generally pretty low. However, some testers need or want to run Cucumber on the Java Virtual Machine. Yes, you can use JRuby to run the Ruby version of Cucumber on the JVM. But you can also use Cucumber-JVM, which is a port of the Ruby version into Java. However, I find many testers have a hard time getting started with it, particularly if they are coming from Ruby. What follows is the tutorial I wanted and either didn’t find or didn’t look hard enough to find.
Data Building with Symbiont
In the previous post in data setting, I talked about the start of a data builder pattern. Sometimes it’s nice to have your automation use descriptive phrases that stand in for specific bits of data. So here I’ll describe how Symbiont allows this by adhering to a data builder pattern.
Data Setting with Symbiont
In this post, I’ll explore how I’m starting to provide a data builder pattern with Symbiont. The specific focus is on how you supply data to page definitions as part of your automated test logic.
Path Testing: Independent Paths
This post follows on from the previous two in this series (theory and path coverage). A key theme of these posts is that of modeling paths through an application and then using tests to exercise those paths. What we’ve seen so far is that while many path segments are covered repeatedly, others may only be touched once. You most likely won’t have time to test them all. Along with that, some paths will be more data-dependent than others. So a selection process is critical. Here I’ll talk more about that selection process.
Multiple Versions of Python on Windows
A lot of testers like to use Python. A lot of testers are on Windows machines. There is currently a large gap in the Python world between the 2.x and 3.x branch. (See more details on this.) This often puts testers in the position of having to make Python solutions that run on both versions. But, on Windows at least, this has been tricky in terms of having two Python versions installed and easily moving between them. Here I’ll talk about how the Python development team has eased this with the Windows launcher.