Productivity: Testing

If you were following Twitter last this last weekend (4 and 5 May) you may have seen a number of Tweets tagged with #TelSum. That was the Telerik Testing Summit, a peer conference held in Austin, Texas. Telerik welcomed a number of thought leaders in the testing and software industry to Austin, Texas, for two days of discussions on the state of software development. More importantly, we as a group were focused on what we could do to try and improve things. Telerik was represented by myself and Phil Sams, plus Holly Bertoncini, our event organizer. Joining us ...

A good test case is neither too small nor too big. A good test case stands alone, sets up pre-test conditions, exercises the application under test (AUT), verifies one thing, reports the results of the verification, then if applicable, cleans up (usually data) and reports the overall test case result; pass or fail. 

It’s that time of the year: the latest, greatest release of Telerik’s Test Studio is due out Wednesday, 11 April! We’ve got a number of great features lined up for this release: integrated bug tracking, exploratory testing tooling, better support for HTML controls, and of course, the big feature: load testing! Grab the release bits tomorrow, but be sure to stop by the Release webinar on Wednesday, 25 April at 11AM Eastern US. You’ll need to register first, but there are plenty of spaces! Load testing can be a complex, intimidating subject. If you’d like some more information, I ...

This morning I gave a “Speed Geeking Breakfast Talk” at the Software Testing Professionals Conference in New Orleans. Speed Geeking talks at STPCon are eight minute lightning format talks. There’s not really any time for Q&A during the talks, but they’re great for laying out important points and starting a conversation after the talk. My talk was whimsically titled “Brittle Automation or a Sharp Stick in the Eye? Wait, Let Me Think.” My point with the title is that badly done test automation can become such a time-consuming, frustrating task that the pain of it is metaphorically worse than  a ...

Many applications render data in tables; writing tests for table-based data is a very common task. Unless you approach it with a bit of preparation, it’s also a task that can easily result in you building very brittle tests. Consider the following grid which displays a list of contacts after having taken actions elsewhere in the system. (I’m using a Telerik RadGrid for AJAX in this example, by the way.) Perhaps one of our tests is to verify Jayne Cobb appears in the table. I can easily do that in two steps via a recorded step. Easy! The problem is ...