Skip to main content

Why I keep badgering on about Web Testing..

Lately I've become somewhat obsessed with testing. A specific kind of testing. I'm not quite sure about the term right now, but it's close to system testing, or maybe user testing. Ye know, that kind of black-box testing that makes sure your stuff works from the user's perspective. In web applications (of which I probably do about 90% of the time) they happen to blend in with web tests.

I suppose it started off with last autumn when I put some thoughts on this into my lightning talk at the Smidig 2007 conference. Well, it actually started all the way back in 2006 when I did a lightning talk about Selenium in XP-meetup based on my experiences with Selenium vs. gargantuan use-case descriptions in a project (see slides).



A few months ago I was down visiting a friend in Bonn, Germany. He works for this CMS-vendor/host called WebFactory. I offered him to drop by their workplace and do a quick demo on Selenium, as I figured they're (a) probably doing web applications, and (b) they're probably not doing web testing (in the automated figure o' speech).

Strictly speaking, I didn't actually do the demo; I had my friend do the demo instead. I took some time in advance to teach him how, and naturally he made a much better point of how to use the tool in their shop than I could. Neat sales trick, eh?

Anyhow, one of the guys' impression was "We had no idea it was that easy!", which is the usual response triggered by showing off Selenium. The 10 minute demo eloped into hours of interesting discussion on all things web, testing, JavaScript, Comet, etc, and the whole thing sort of re-invigorated my feeling of that people still do not know enough about web testing, and the world would be a bit better off if more people knew about it.


If you don't know what it is, there it is (in its simplest sense). A Firefox plugin that records your browsing instructions and can replay them later on a lot faster than you can with mouse and keyboard.

A few weeks later I went on to do a 30-minute session on web testing for my current customer's Java developers. Some days later on I held a 2 hour guest lecture in the University of Oslo's open source course.

I figured, hey, I'm starting to get quite good at presenting this web testing stuff. So I piggy-backed my own effort when writing an abstract submitted to this year's JavaZone conference. I have to admit it's not the most academical subject I would've liked to talk about. But I still see people (a) doing web applications, and (b) not automating their tests. I think it's good talk material because it is:

  • Simple and easy to convey
  • Really useful
  • (and I'm not trying to push any proprietary stuff here, I'm not even a Selenium committer)

So that's why I keep badgering on about Selenium and web testing. I could write page after page on web testing, but for now, if you're interested, take a look at the links in this post and take Selenium for a spin if you haven't already (the new 1.0 beta version is pretty sweet). And give me a shout on what you would have me write about next time. For instance:

* How web tests fit into the bigger picture (testing strategies and all that)
* Why I exaggerated when I once said Selenium tests can replace use-cases
* Why manual testing is still important
* Putting Selenium tests into a Continous Integration server (i.e. expanding my last post on the subject)

Comments

  1. I like this post! Nice too see that other people is also interested in automating their tests.. As Uncle Bob says, it's just not humane to let people test what is possible to automate.

    Give it a swing ;)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Open source CMS evaluations

I have now seen three more or less serious open source CMS reviews. First guy to hit the field was Matt Raible ( 1 2 3 4 ), ending up with Drupal , Joomla , Magnolia , OpenCms and MeshCMS being runner-ups. Then there is OpenAdvantage that tries out a handful ( Drupal , Exponent CMS , Lenya , Mambo , and Silva ), including Plone which they use for their own site (funny/annoying that the entire site has no RSS-feeds, nor is it possible to comment on the articles), following Matt's approach by exluding many CMS that seem not to fit the criteria. It is somewhat strange that OpenAdvantage cuts away Magnolia because it "Requires J2EE server; difficult to install and configure; more of a framework than CMS", and proceed to include Apache Lenya in the full evaluation. Magnolia does not require a J2EE server. It runs on Tomcat just like Lenya does (maybe it's an idea to bundle Magnolia with Jetty to make it seem more lightweight). I'm still sure that OpenAdvant

What I've Learned After a Month of Podcasting

So, it's been about a month since I launched   GitMinutes , and wow, it's been a fun ride. I have gotten a lot of feedback, and a lot more downloads/listeners than I had expected! Judging the numbers is hard, but a generous estimate is that somewhere around 2000-3000 have listened to the podcast, and about 500-1000 regularly download. Considering that only a percentage of my target audience actively listen to podcasts, these are some pretty good numbers. I've heard that 10% of the general population in the western world regularly listen to podcasts (probably a bit higher percentage among Git users), so I like to think I've reached a big chunk of the Git pros out there. GitMinutes has gathered 110 followers on Twitter, and 63, erm.. circlers on Google+, and it has received 117 +'es! And it's been flattr'ed twice :) Here are some of the things I learned during this last month: Conceptually.. Starting my own sandbox podcast for trying out everythin

Considerations for JavaScript in Modern (2013) Java/Maven Projects

Disclaimer: I'm a Java developer, not a JavaScript developer. This is just what I've picked up the last years plus a little research the last days. It's just a snapshot of my current knowledge and opinions on the day of writing, apt to change over the next weeks/months. We've gone all modern in our web applications, doing MVC on the client side with AngularJS or Ember , building single-page webapps with REST backends. But how are we managing the growing amount of JavaScript in our application? Yeoman 's logo (not necessarily the conclusion of this blog post) You ain't in Kansas anymore So far we've just been doing half-random stuff. We download some version of a library and throw it into our src/main/webapp/js/lib , or we use it from a CDN , which may be down or unreachable when we want to use the application.. Some times the JS is minified, other times it's not. Some times we name the file with version number, other times without. Some

Managing dot-files with vcsh and myrepos

Say I want to get my dot-files out on a new computer. Here's what I do: # install vcsh & myrepos via apt/brew/etc vcsh clone https://github.com/tfnico/config-mr.git mr mr update Done! All dot-files are ready to use and in place. No deploy command, no linking up symlinks to the files . No checking/out in my entire home directory as a Git repository. Yet, all my dot-files are neatly kept in fine-grained repositories, and any changes I make are immediately ready to be committed: config-atom.git     -> ~/.atom/* config-mr.git     -> ~/.mrconfig     -> ~/.config/mr/* config-tmuxinator.git       -> ~/.tmuxinator/* config-vim.git     -> ~/.vimrc     -> ~/.vim/* config-bin.git        -> ~/bin/* config-git.git               -> ~/.gitconfig config-tmux.git       -> ~/.tmux.conf     config-zsh.git     -> ~/.zshrc How can this be? The key here is to use vcsh to keep track of your dot-files, and its partner myrepos/mr for o

Git Stash Blooper (Could not restore untracked files from stash)

The other day I accidentally did a git stash -a , which means it stashes *everything*, including ignored output files (target, build, classes, etc). Ooooops.. What I meant to do was git stash -u , meaning stash modifications plus untracked new files. Anyhows, I ended up with a big fat stash I couldn't get back out. Each time I tried, I got something like this: .../target/temp/dozer.jar already exists, no checkout .../target/temp/core.jar already exists, no checkout .../target/temp/joda-time.jar already exists, no checkout .../target/foo.war already exists, no checkout Could not restore untracked files from stash No matter how I tried checking out different revisions (like the one where I actually made the stash), or using --force, I got the same error. Now these were one of those "keep cool for a second, there's a git way to fix this"situation. I figured: A stash is basically a commit. If we look at my recent commits using   git log --graph --