Productivity

[Update: Added links for Hexawise and Allpairs, which I’d meant to do earlier.] Data driving, also often called parameterization, is a wonderful way to increase your test coverage though parts of your system; however, it’s also a seductive, alluring tool that can needlessly explode your tests’ complexity and execution cost. Let’s tackle the cons of data driving first, then walk through how it can, when mindfully used, lend some great value to your automation suites. Problems with Data Driving Automated test scripts need to be treated like production code—because they are production code! With that in mind, as test ...

I thought I’d follow up that last post on Using Data Driven Testing Wisely with something specific around the size of the dataset for a data driven test (DDT). What’s a good size for a DDT? As with everything in software engineering/testing, the answer is “42.” That, or “It depends.” In all seriousness, the right size of a dataset for a carefully thought out scenario does indeed depend. My payroll algorithm in the last post was a simple test set. You may be working something much more complex relating to finance, rocket science, or environmental controls. Every situation’s different, but ...

Our guest blogger, the Contented Coder, Bradley Braithwaite shares the 5 most common TDD mistakes that he has encountered over the years.

Occasionally we get complaints that the WaitForVisible steps in Test Studio don't work correctly. Our response is "It's not our fault!"   Here's what I mean: the Visibility check relies on the Computed Style of the element as seen through the lens of the browser. Specifically we look at the Display property. Here's a video of me using the Google Developer tool to determine the visibility property of an HTML element. Display:none means element is not visible. So it might be that your browser of choice is not very good at determining the visibility factor. Personally I recommend that ...

The next major release of JustCode is fast approaching, and we have included previews of some of its major features in the most recent internal build. To support these, we had to make a change to the way in which JustCode loads extensions.