Check out what the Ministry of Testing, Applitools + Test Automation University, and Mabl + Lisa Crispin have brewing!

There is so much going on in the software testing community with the Ministry of Testing, Applitools' Test Automation University, and Mabl and Lisa Crispin's webinar series, Modeling Your Test Automation Strategy!

Four Years of Adventures in Automation!

When I started this blog, it was before I ever found my first automation development position. This blog was a way for me to keep up the good fight, journaling my experience.

Four years and 321 blog posts later, I have been on teams building testing frameworks in Selenium WebDriver + Java, NightwatchJS + NodeJS,  Capybara + Ruby, and now ScalaTest and Scala. The Programming Projects section of this site captures my experiments with many others.

This blog acted as a springboard for me to start publishing articles, contributing to software testing books, and giving talks at online conferences. You can read more about it in the Media section of this blog.

I don't get as much time to write on this blog as I used to. The main reason?

T.J. Maher and his son, Tommy.

... After work, I seem to be otherwise occupied in baby giggles, baby cuddles, and baby snuggles.

I wanted to thank you, dear reader, for all your help. This blog has been a magnificent conversation started with many a hero in the software testing field. Thank you so much, Alan Richardson, Bas Dijkstra, Jim Hazan, Matt Hutchinson - Testing Curator, Joe Colantonio, Lisa Crispin, and most importantly Angie Jones.

So far, in four years this blog has received 730,089 pageviews, with 70% of the visitors going "Software Testing? Automation? The hell?? This isn't what I Googled!" and promptly going back to wherever they came from.

If you want to drop a line to say hello, I am on Twitter, and I am always online!

Happy Testing!

-T.J. Maher
Sr. QA Engineer, Software Engineer in Test
Meetup Organizer, Ministry of Testing - Boston

Twitter | YouTube | LinkedIn | Articles

Basic Capybara-Gauge: Review the Ruby code with Rubocop

This is the seventh part of a series of blog posts. Care to go back to the beginning? 

Tinkering with Ruby only for the past year, Rubocop, a "Ruby static code analyzer and formatter, based on the community Ruby style guide" according to their Github site is both a blessing and a curse for someone new to the language. It is blessing that it is so detailed with output. The curse is that if you are new, it is going to take a lot of random Googling to figure out what all the errors thrown actual mean!

There is a lot of content in the Ruby Style Guide...

What is the Ruby Style Guide?

From the Ruby Style Guide README: "This Ruby style guide recommends best practices so that real-world Ruby programmers can write code that can be maintained by other real-world Ruby programmers. A style guide that reflects real-world usage gets used, while a style guide that holds to an ideal that has been rejected by the people it is supposed to help risks not getting used at all—no matter how good it is. [...]

"There are some areas in which there is no clear consensus in the Ruby community regarding a particular style (like string literal quoting, spacing inside hash literals, dot position in multi-line method chaining, etc.). In such scenarios all popular styles are acknowledged and it's up to you to pick one and apply it consistently".

Basic Capybara-Gauge: Add Chrome and ChromeDriver logging capabilities

This is the sixth part of a series of blog posts. Care to go back to the beginning? 

Want to view JavaScript errors in Chrome? Or see if your Selenium WebDriver instance is throwing any errors? Check out the Logging Preference Capabilities from the Chromium project.

With this article, we will demonstrate how to get these logs set up in your Capybara-Ruby project, and what to add in the spec_helper.rb file we created.

Basic Capybara-Gauge: Setting Up Specs and Step Implementations

This is the fifth part of a series of blog posts. Care to go back to the beginning? 

So far, we have written test specifications to test Dave Haeffner's The-Internet, and we have set up the Gauge-Ruby environment. We managed to get Chrome to run a simple Capybara test, and figured out how to make the test run in Headless Chrome. Our test we created last time...

specs/Navigation/Navigation.spec
# Navigation: Go to The-Internet Login Page

## NAVIGATION: Visit The-Internet
* LOGIN: Visit the Login Page
* LOGIN: Verify the heading is "Login Page"

... For this entry, we will be building upon that, figuring out how to get our Capybara-Gauge framework to execute the following:

Authorization: Validate logging into and out of The-Internet

• Scenario #1: Authorization: Successfully log into and out of the secure area 

• Scenario #2: Authorization: Verify alert error is shown when entering a blank user name and password.

Basic Capybara-Gauge: Set Up Headless Chrome

This is the fourth part of a series of blog posts. Care to go back to the beginning? 

We've come up with test specs for Dave Haeffner's The-Internet. We've set up a Ruby environment to run the tests, and configured Chrome to open the Login page.

With this entry, we will be activating Chrome in Headless Mode, i.e. running Chrome but without a visual interface, allowing the tests to run faster.

About Headless Chrome

According to Eric Bidelman's article, Getting Started with Headless Chrome, the new option of running Chrome in Headless mode started with Google Chrome version 59, released in May 2017.

Before, you had to use something such as PhantomJS to emulate the Chrome browser if you wanted to run Chrome in a place where the processing power to bring up a visual window would be a waste, such as running it with an automated test script running in a continuous integration environment. Now, it is built right in.

Basic Capybara-Gauge: Setting Up Capybara to Open a Chrome Browser

This is the third part of a series of blog posts. Care to go back to the beginning? 

So far, we have written test specifications to test Dave Haeffner's The-Internet, and we have set up the Gauge-Ruby environment.

Now, we need to set Capybara up to be integrated with the Gauge test framework. 

Basic Capybara-Gauge: Setup Ruby Environments for The-Internet

This is the second part of a series of blog posts. Care to go back to the beginning? 

With the last entry, we analyzed the App Under Test, Dave Haeffner's The-Internet and came up with some test specifications. With this entry, we will be setting up the Ruby environment that will be running the Capybara-Gauge tests.

Although I am developing this project on my Macbook with this example, it is possible to install Ruby, Gauge on a Windows Machine.  See my article, Intro to setting up a BDD framework with VS Code + Gauge + Ruby.

Video Talk: How Software Testers Can Work With Developers

Joe Colantonio, creator of the absolutely awesome software testing podcast TestTalks.com, started in an entire series of Guild Conferences: The Automation Guild, the Testing Guild, and the AI Guild.

Back in January 2018 I was invited to speak as part of the Automation Guild 2018. I gave a talk How to Pass Coding Interview as an Automation Engineer.

I was invited again to speak for Joe's Testing Guild in June 2018. Although automation is all the rage, sucking up most of the oxygen out of any conversation about testing, I decided to give a talk getting back to basics:

How Software Testers Can Work With Developers
June 20, 2018
https://youtu.be/m3nenJ-hAOM

"T.J. Maher has been a software tester for over twenty years since before the concept of Agile software development existed. He believes the relationship between developers and testers should not be one of artist and art critic. Instead, it should be one of a writer and a copyeditor, each working together to create a quality product. T.J. will be sharing his experiences working with developers pre-Agile, working with them on Agile teams, and his insight gained by shifting to automation development".
Enjoy!

And, as always, Happy Testing!

-T.J. Maher
Sr. QA Engineer, Software Engineer in Test
Meetup Organizer, Ministry of Testing - Boston

Twitter | YouTube | LinkedIn | Articles

Basic Capybara-Gauge: Analyzing The-Internet

Basic Capybara-Gauge: Analyzing The-Internet

For the past year, my job at work has been to create an automation framework that monitors daily our web-based application, putting it through its paces. This project will be showcasing tools and technologies used to compose the framework, but most importantly, the thought process analyzing the site to determine what to test.

Our application under test for this project will be an old favorite of mine: The-Internet, created by Dave Haeffner, author of the SeleniumGuidebook.com -- which comes in C#, Java, JavaScript, Python, and Ruby editions -- and the very helpful blog ElementalSelenium.com.

The tools we will be using:

• ThoughtWorks Gauge, to set up the tests in a human readable fashion
• Capybara, to handle interaction between the tests and the browser
• Ruby, the programming language of the framework
• Bundler, to help manage Ruby's gem files