Category: Test automation
Better BDD – a Javascript Protractor experiment – Building a test framework organically
August 17, 2016
So almost two years in to my test manager role, I seem to have freed up time to get back on the tools somewhat. While there are a huge number of problems to solve, I first decided to have a look at protractor for a few reasons: I didn’t feel we were getting much value […]
Why record-playback (almost) never works and why almost nobody is using it anyway
June 1, 2016
Alister Scott once again calls out a number of spot-on technical points regarding the use of automation tools. In this case, he discusses record/playback automation tools. Technical reasons aside, we also need to look at the non-technical reasons. I’ve only once encountered someone trying to rely on the record-playback feature of an automation tool (my […]
A reminder on what not do when you’re automating testing
October 12, 2012
Five years ago I wrote, somewhat flippantly, on automation failure, but apparently some people never noticed. It still seems relevant, so please go and read (or re-read) ‘Automate your way to ineffective testing with my twelve step program…‘
Cool Watir-related gem from Tim Koopmans
May 18, 2011
Tim seems to be pretty busy now that he’s a free agent, so I’m looking forward to trying this new(ish) gem he announced recently for querying browser performance stats. I can’t believe it’s been as long as it has since I last posted. This has mostly been because I’ve been busy preparing to become a dad. […]
Test automation styles and alternatives to the Page Object pattern
January 25, 2011
Alister Scott has posted some code examples on watirmelon.com that show different solutions to a problem that arises for people implementing the Page Object pattern for test automation. I found Alister’s approach solutions interesting, because as my automation usually models business/user goals and/or domain features/concepts, I don’t often have my own page abstraction. See http://gojko.net/2009/10/06/putting-selenium-in-the-right-place/ […]
Progress bar for Ruby Sequel datasets
September 28, 2010
I’m hacking away at a tool to give me better JMeter results, and I needed to see progress as I iterated through the data I’d imported into MySQL. The progress bar described in my earlier post can be made to work with a simple addition: class Sequel::Dataset alias :size :count end This adds the necessary […]
Stop Firefox asking where to save downloads with Watir-Webdriver by changing profile
September 27, 2010
My friend James has been using watir-webdriver to test his latest work. He was having trouble with Firefox prompting for the location to save files, which blocked the scripts he was running. While I’d like to claim some credit for pointing him at some helpful links, I think my real contribution was limited to being […]
Automating Flash, AJAX, Popups and more using Ruby, Watir and Sikuli
August 16, 2010
Jonathan Kohl pointed me at Sikuli, a Python-based tool for automating applications using image recognition. Unlike most tools, which attempt to identify objects via public APIs, Sikuli looks at the pixels on the screen and attempts to identify objects based on how they look. This isn’t exactly a new approach, as commercial tools have had […]
Watir popup examples not working (and a solution, finally)
July 26, 2010
I’ve been finding popups in Watir a pain of late, with most of the solutions on watir.com not working for me. Finally today, I found something that worked. Steve Swanson’s solution did the trick. However, before it could work, I had to figure out that the AutoIT dll wasn’t correctly registered. If you try the […]
Feedback is nice. Good feedback is even nicer.
July 1, 2010
Today I found out that my post on Watir and TinyMCE let someone dump their Quick Test Pro licences. A victory for common sense… Nothing against QTP, but if you’re testing web applications, you should probably be looking at other tools.