Last week I attended the CONQUEST 2010 conference. As I was invited to be part of an experts panel, I answered some questions from the conference attendees about testing, quality, and how all of this works. In particular I was invited as an expert on Agile testing. The session was voice recorded, in order for the transcript to be provided online in a few weeks. Since it will be on German and we had to restrict our answers to two minutes, I asked the organizers, Karin Vosseberg and Andreas Spillner, whether I may translate the questions to English and publish them on my blog, and got the permission to do so. So, this is the first set of questions (from the CONQUEST 2010 attendees) and answers (from myself). The first set of questions is filed under the topic “Testing as a profession”.
Category Archives: Agile Testing
Testing inside agile development cycles
Third-party library integration with Robot Framework’s jar
Personally, I arrived at my new company, and already got some new duties to fulfill. One of them was to get a GWT application under test. Since I made great experiences with Robot Framework and its Selenium Library while automating ParkCalc a while back, I decided to try it out for the application.
Besides all of the awkwardness coming form not generated ids on the xhtml of the web-pages, I finally got a first spike solution to run. After some more refactoring steps, I decided to provide some automation of the tests, so that my colleagues are able to work with it as well. Since the application is developed with eclipse in Java, I wanted to use a similar infrastructure to get the tests automated. Thereby, I decided to try out the packaged jar file of Robot Framework 2.5.x. This went amazingly smooth. Since I had to integrate the Selenium Library with the jar file, I was wondering, if this will be reusable, and what I need to do for it. The UserGuide describes, that I should repackage the jar, but this step I wanted to explicitly avoid.
Instead, I took a closer look. In order to try out the simplest thing that could possibly work, I created a lib directory in the eclipse that I had created, and added the jar file to that lib directory. Inside the lib directory I created a Lib directory (with upper case L), where I copied the SeleniumLibrary directory from my local installation, containing the python files necessary for the integration as well as the Selenium Server library in it’s own lib directory.
I was amazed that this was all I needed to do in order to integrate the Robot Framework jar file (which encapsulated jython) with the Selenium Library. I even tried to rename the installed Selenium Library just to be sure, that this was indeed all I needed to do, and was amazed when I found out that the packaged jython already created .class files for the Selenium Library python classes.
All I then needed to do, was to create an ant build script, which simply invokes the jarfile, and now I can call this from the build server of our continuous integration system. Wonderful, isn’t it?
The case for slack
Some while ago, J.B. Rainsberger posted a case for slack, and that you might be sabotaging your peoples training. I think it was Kent Beck who pointed me to the self-similarity of nature in eXtreme programming explained. In this post I’m going to take a closer look on how we learn, and how nature is self-similar in this regard, and what we may derive from this.
Quality is value to some person at some time
Recently a discussion on the famous quote from Jerry Weinberg on
Quality is value to some person.
arose. I already mentioned it some time earlier restating that quality is ambiguous as different people understand different things when they hear the word quality.
Continue reading Quality is value to some person at some timeParkCalc automation – Keyword-driven tests in FitNesse
To conclude the ParkCalc mini-series, I choose to work through test automation using keywords with FitNesse. As I was using Selenium mostly with RobotFramework, I decided to use Selenesse for the integration into the FitNesse environment. Here is the write-up as I implement the tests.
Continue reading ParkCalc automation – Keyword-driven tests in FitNesseInterview in Software Test & Quality Assurance
Matt Heusser is setting up an interview with me in the Software Test & Quality Assurance magazine. The name of the series is Ask The Tester, and until now there he interviewed Jon Bach for the most recent magazine issue and Michael Bolton for the next to come. That said, I feel honored to be the third in this series next to these great testers.
As the name of the series is “Ask The Tester” the community is called for submissions of questions. So, if you have any particular question for me regarding testing, the Miagi-Do school of testing, Agile testing, Weekend Testing, writing about testing, etc. please leave a comment on this blog entry with your name, city, province, and country, and you may end up with your name in a print magazine.
ParkCalc automation – Templates for data-driven tests
As pointed out earlier, I wanted to work through a test for ParkCalc using templates. As this did not seem to work, and I got no clue why, I gave up and postponed it. Today I was able to take a step back with a fresh mind and approach the problem with a different focus. So, here is the template solution for ParkCalc automation.
Continue reading ParkCalc automation – Templates for data-driven testsParkCalc automation – A short reflection
Over the course of the past week or so, I wrote some blog entries on ParkCalc automation. Today I decided it’s time for a brief wrap-up on what I learned over the course. You can find the four parts written up so far here:
Getting started, Refactoring a data-driven test, Refactoring a keyword-driven test, BDD style tests
ParkCalc automation – BDD style tests
In the comments on one of the previous blog entries in this series, Pekka Klärck pointed out that another great way to refactor a keyword-driven test to a data-driven is the usage of templates within Robot Framework. Before doing this, we will take a look at BDD style tests using given, when, and then. Following an ATDD approach does not make sense for the problem statement given, but I will at least scratch that topic during the reflection.
Continue reading ParkCalc automation – BDD style testsParkCalc automation – Refactoring a keyword-driven test
Today, we’re going to continue our ParkCalc automation excursion. We will take a closer look on the second test in the provided test examples, the keyword-driven format, and see how we can improve it. Please note that I added an update to the previous blog entry showing that we can improve the test even more by extracting the date ranger into meaningfully named variables – just as Dale Emery did in his article Writing Maintainable Automated Acceptance Tests.
Continue reading ParkCalc automation – Refactoring a keyword-driven test