My Article in Testing Trapeze

I have just had an article that I wrote published in the June edition of Testing Trapeze. This is a great magazine with some really interesting articles from testers in New Zealand and Australia.

My article is entitled "Who Should be Writing Automated Tests?"
Check it out in the June Edition of Testing Trapeze

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Let’s stop writing automated end to end tests through the GUI

What’s the problem? I have not been a fan of Selenium WebDriver since I wrote a set of automated end-to-end tests for a product that had an admittedly complicated user interface. It was quite difficult to write meaningful end-to-end tests and the suite we ended up with was non-deterministic i.e. it failed randomly. Selenium Webdriver may be useful in very simple eCommerce type websites but for most real world products it’s just not up to scratch. This is because it’s prone to race conditions in which Selenium believes that the UI has updated when, in fact, it has not. If this happens, the automated check will fail randomly. While there are techniques for reducing these race conditions, in my experience it is difficult to eradicate them completely. This means that automated checks written with Selenium are inherently flaky or non-deterministic. Maintenance of these automated checks becomes a full time job as it is very time consuming to determine whether a failing check is actuall...

Non Functional Mobile App Testing

When you are testing mobile apps there are a number of non functional elements you need to consider (that do not apply to website testing) such as push notifications, device network issues, location services and app installation. In this post I'll cover these and explain how to test these areas. Push notifications Push notifications were pioneered by Apple in 2008 and this technology was subsequently adopted by Google for its Android OS and by Microsoft for its Windows Phone OS. Push notifications allow an app to deliver information to a mobile device without a specific request from the app. This means that the app does not need to be launched for the mobile device to get the push notification. Each operating system has their own Push Notification Service. On iOS it's called Apple Push Notification Service (APNs) and Android had Google Cloud Messaging (GCM) but this has been superseded by Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM). Note that FCM can also be used to send push n...

How to install a test app onto your mobile device

In this post I'll describe how to actually get test versions of the app onto a device. But first let's discuss whether you should test on an actual device or on an emulator. An emulator is a desktop application that mimics the hardware and OS of a mobile device. The developers will generally do their app development on an emulator and you can use them for early stage testing but when it comes to meaningful end to end testing, a device is a must have. There is no other way to get a feel for the performance of the app and how users will use it real life. Of course you will probably need to test on multiple devices as they vary not only by OS (iOS and Android) but also OS version, device make (e.g. Samsung or Motorola), and screen size. We also now have a new OS for iPads called iPadOS. In a future blog post I'll look at device fragmentation and how to handle it. For now let's assume you are only testing on one iOS device and one Android device. Your developers h...

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