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...

How I got rid of step by step test cases

In my last blog post I told you what I think is wrong with step by step test cases. In this blog post I’ll tell you how I got rid of step by step test cases at the company I work for. When I joined Yambay about 18 months ago, the company was following a fairly traditional waterfall style development approach. They had an offshore test team who wrote step by step test cases in an ALM tool called Test Track. Over the past 18 months we have moved to an agile way of developing our products and have gradually got rid of step by step test cases. User Stories and how I use them to test Getting rid of step by step test cases didn’t happen overnight. Initially we replaced regression test cases and test cases for new features with user stories that have acceptance criteria. The key to using a user story to cover both requirements and testing is to make sure that the acceptance criteria cover all test scenarios. Often product owners and/or business analysts only cover typical scenarios. It...

How to write valuable unit tests

In my last blog post I discussed what makes unit tests valuable and how to structure your code so that you can write valuable unit tests. But so far I haven’t got into the nitty gritty of how you should write these valuable unit tests. I’ll address that in this blog post. There are three styles of unit test: Output Verification , also known as the functional style, involves checking the output of a method for a given input. This style of unit testing does not concern itself with the internals of a method. State Verification involves checking the state of an object rather than the output of a method. Collaboration Verification is where collaboration between classes is tested, and it usually involves test doubles such as mocks. See Vladimir Khorikov’s blog post for further information and code examples: http://enterprisecraftsmanship.com/2016/06/09/styles-of-unit-testing/ So which style is best for writing valuable unit tests? Here are the four attributes of a v...

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