Webinar: Joe Colantonio talks about Test Automation Trends for 2016

Test Automation Trends for 2016 and Beyond

Staying Employable In Changing Times

Sauce Labs Webinar
1/12/2016: 2:00 pm: 
Joe Colantonio, TestTalks.com

Coding isn't the hard part of my role of being a brand-new automation engineer. Although I'm in my forties getting into development for the first time, I am actually doing okay -- in spite of always stressing out about the fact that grad school was a decade ago. I’ve now been writing automation scripts in Java and WebDriver for a year coming this March. Do anything for a year and you start becoming more comfortable with it.

It's keeping up with the latest trends in automated software testing, now that is the hard part!

Automate Amazon: Writing a Shopping Cart Test

This post is seventh in a series of nine. Need to go back to the beginning?

Finally! We have the testing framework written!

Now it is time to write a simple test to check to see how we could develop some tests to use this framework.

Let's call our test method in the PurchaseOrderTest class "test_CreatePurchaseForSingleProduct". Our test can be:

1) Go to the Product page, and check the price of a product, such as the mass market edition of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy  

2) Add the Product to an empty Shopping Cart 

3) Verify the price in the Shopping Cart Review page is the same as the product.

Automate Amazon: Initializing Login and Cart

This post is sixth of a series of nine. Need to go back to the beginning?

While drafting the tests to handle adding products to the shopping cart, I came across two problems:

• I kept on on finding that I was logged into my personal Amazon.com account instead of the test account. 
• From one session to the next, Amazon kept remembering what I had in my shopping cart the test before. 

Before the test is run, we need to initialize the login session, and clear all items found in the cart.

Automate Amazon: ProductEnums and ProductObjects

This post is fifth of a series of nine. Need to go back to the beginning?

What good would a shopping cart test be without adding any test products? Let's investigate how to get to the product items on Amazon.

What our Directory Structure Will Look Like

After we store Url and Product locations in Enums, add to the the Actions classes, create a Book pojo to store values of a Book product, and add the ProductsPage page object, our test structure could look like this:

Automate Amazon: Writing a Sign In Test

This post is fourth of a series of nine. Need to go back to the beginning?

Drafting a Login Test for Amazon.com won't be as easy as drafting one for Dave Haeffner's mock site, The-Internet. There needs to be a lot more infrastructure put in place besides the CommonUtils library we worked on in the last blog post. Also, Amazon.com use the word "Login". Instead, they use the phrase Sign In.

Automate Amazon: CommonUtils, methods and exceptions

This post is third of a series of nine. Need to go back to the beginning?

The Selenium WebDriver API provides the basic methods to manipulate a browser to perform actions, such as navigating to a web page, but it doesn't have all the functionality we would need. What if we wanted to add in exception handling, such as if the web page was not found? What if we wanted to throw a customized error to a log file when the page was not found? What if, even upon a success, we wanted to write a message to the log?

A Common Utilities library, such as one they are using at my workplace, can be developed to handle these cases. Each Selenium API method is wrapped in try / catch / throw blocks for exception handling, built-in with logging functionality. When things go wrong, clear and concise error messages will save a lot of time debugging if the issue was with the server, with the code of the site, or the tests themselves.

Automate Amazon: Sketch out a Use Case

This post is second of a series of nine. Need to go back to the beginning?

With the last blog entry, we talked about setting up a development environment and running our first test.

With this entry, we are going to examine Amazon.com's site and see if we can come up with a quick test to automate creating a purchase order with Amazon's Sign In, AddToCart and Checkout process.

Automate Amazon: Development Environment Setup

This post is first in a series of nine.

Back in June 2015, I blogged about how I would write automated tests vs Dave Haeffner's site, "The-Internet".

For this second project, I picked a more difficult site to automate: Puchasing an order on Amazon.com's site.

Next Week: Automating Amazon : How I Am Spending My Christmas Vacation

Automating Amazon: How I Am Spending My Christmas Vacation: 

For the past few years, I have been coming up with little side projects during my Christmas break to help deepen my knowledge of the software testing industry.

• December 2012: Examining the book How Google Tests Software
• December 2013: Taking Alan Richardson's excellent online course Selenium 2 WebDriver with Java
• December 2014: I was quite busy! I retook Alan Richardson's course, spent time creating this blog, and I finally created a GitHub account storing Java and Python code samples I could show to prospective employers as I interviewed for automation development positions. Quite handy when I was caught up in a surprise layoff and was searching for automation positions this time last year.

This Christmas, I was going to carry on the tradition!

New Editor's Draft of W3C WebDriver Specification Released!

A new Editor's Draft of the W3C Spec Has Been Published! 

A new Editor's Draft written by Simon Stewart and David Burns has been released on December 3, 2015 to the World Wide Web Consortium's Browser Testing and Tools Working Group: https://w3c.github.io/webdriver/webdriver-spec.html