Each day presents something new to learn.

So I have used quite a number of tools in my time building test automation frameworks over the years; and in the last 2years i have evaluated a number of these tools and i am becoming more and more opinionated in my choice of tools. For someone that has used selenium/webdriver and cucumber a lot in the past, i find myself using Geb and Spock these days and it hasnt been much difficulty in switch to these tools.

This post is spurned by taking a reflection on my journey as a tester and it’s amazing to see how much i have moved from designing large UI test suites to very small UI test suites. For emphasis, the largest test suite had taken over 8 hrs and the smallest has been 3mins of execution time. There are a lot of posts on the internet about how fragile a UI test framework could be and i would expect the next question to be how have you been able to achieve this.

I have recently taken on ownership of a website and as part of the migration task i’ve had to copy over a few artefacts;I will be posting another blog about what i have learnt from this process. The website uses Amazon s3 for storing users’ uploaded photos and document. I was faced with the task of copying these files over to my S3 account. Quite a number of ways to achieve this; but i stumbled on a link which is a python script that copies object between two buckets in the same account.

In my last blog post, i described how i have used jmeter-plugins at my current client site, now i am faced with another problem , i need to be able to run these performance test from command line, in other for these performance tests to be executed in a CI environment such as teamcity. A quick search brings to light the ant jmeter task which is an ant task for running jmeter test.

Jmeter is a well known open source performance/load testing tool and to be fair it does a lot of stuff really well. if you wants to do some quick performance testing without a whole lots of infrastructure around it then it is great. I started out my task with jmeter with some objectives: <li> A tool that i could integrate into a CI tool such as teamcity</li> <li> Meaningful graphs that could be easily interpreted by any one in the team</li> <li> Able to integrate the graphs into teamcity</li> <li> Able to monitor the performance of the website under test.

Sometime i would use my blog as a place to keep interesting stuff for future exploration. I came across the chrome net internals today and i think it exposes a lot of useful information that might be useful to testers when testing a web application. To access the chrome net internals, navigate to chrome://net-internals/ on a google chrome browser. I would be spending some more time in the future exploring this but for now its back to work.

In my the few years, where i have pushed for testers developers to write acceptance test before development or implementation commences, I’ve had testers come up to me say its difficult to achieve this when you dont know what the UI would look like. This post would attempt to decribe how i have done this in the past and i still do this at the moment. NB: Ideally i would write my test using page object pattern, if this was a new project, I would start creating page objects

I have been working at this client where i am opportuned to use cucumber, watir-webdriver and i came across this problem today. The application i am testing is an e-commerce site and i am writing test for a page on which i click on an item and the item appears on the shopping basket area of the site. My code look like [code] def select_item(item_name) @browser.li(:text => /#{item_name}/).link(:class_name => “addOptions”).click Watir::Wait.

I moved my blog from the blogger one to wordpress and i wanted to ensure that people that have bookmarked post on my old blog get redirected to the new one on wordpress as i wouldnt be update the old blog anymore. I found a lot of effort by different people and all the stuff that was suggested using javascript didnt work for me, what i got was regardless of the page you are on my old blogger site, you would be redirected to my homepage on the wordpress site which is not very helpful.

Having just finished an engagement with a client where the development practices include kanban and BDD. Kanban for us meant that we give priority to work on the right side of the board. So as a tester, I would rather spend my time doing some manual testing on a story that is in the QA queue, than writing automated acceptance tests for a story in the queue for Acceptance Tests.