Productivity: Testing

Raise your hand if something similar to this has ever happened to you: You write a functional test that uses your system’s UI to create a user. You automate navigating to the proper screen, you get all the right values filled in, the Submit button gets clicked, and you do a check for the “User created!” message. You run the test a couple times to make sure everything’s working smoothly. Things look good, so you check it in to source control, where it gets wrapped in to your regular automation runs. Shortly after a new bug gets filed stating newly ...

Back in late August/early September I spoke at the Rocky Mountain Ruby conference in Boulder, Colorado. My talk was about lessons learned dealing with large functional test suites over my career. For example, at a previous job I ran a team that got up to 9,000 Selenium tests scattered across roughly 850 test fixtures. I’ve had similar experiences working on other projects too. The talk was videotaped and is now up on the Confreaks video hosting site: Surviving Growing from Zero to 15,000 Selenium Tests. Yes, the talk’s title is wrong. I goofed when submitting it. The fundamentals I ...

In this final post of my performance testing series I’ll help you figure out where to start, then pass on a few resources I’ve found extremely helpful in my own efforts. What do I Monitor? Figuring out which metrics, measurements, and counters to monitor can be extremely daunting—there are hundreds of individual counters in Performance Monitor alone! In most cases you don’t need anywhere near the entire set of metrics. A few counters will give us all the information you generally need for starting your performance testing work. Most performance testing gurus will tell you just a few items will ...

Updated: I realized that I didn’t make it clear I was writing this post from a vendor’s viewpoint! My choices of what to automate below are based on the view of a tester working on the team for this component—the creators of this control. You, as a consumer, should rarely, rarely ever automate third party controls or components. You may need some high-level test to ensure custom functionality works correctly, but your value is much better focused on testing your own software. Don’t invest in automating Google, Telerik, or other commercial products. -------- When you’re working with automation, choosing what ...

We’ve got a great new release of Test Studio coming up which contains a number of tremendous new features and some great updates to existing functionality.The list is long, but here are a few highlights: Dive into your web application’s performance with our new performance testing feature set Bring your manual test cases into Test Studio where you can manage them, record results, and even create “fast forward” automated steps to offload tedious prerequisite setup tasks Take advantage of HTML 5 with Test Studio’s enhanced support for interacting with a variety of HTML5’s common tags Improved element management: search the ...