Category: Tool-assisted testing
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 […]
More Ruby goodness for testing
July 10, 2014
Did I mention how much I love Ruby? items = (“A”..”Z”).to_a.in_groups(5,false) 5.times do | i | puts items[i].flatten.to_s puts “—-” end Source code is at http://apidock.com/rails/Array/in_groups
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 […]
Comparing files and alternatives(?) to Diff
May 28, 2010
Continuing the ‘what tool’ theme from last week, today’s topic is ‘Diff’. I frequently install windows versions of various Unix command line utilities via the Gnu Utilities for Win32 project. Diff is particularly handy not just for the programming side of automation, but also for comparing output files from automation as well as database queries. Occasionally […]
Building regular expressions
May 19, 2010
When my testing gets technical, there are a lot of things that I only have to grapple with infrequently. Regular expressions are one of those in-again, out-again things for which my expertise varies depending on when you ask me. Today’s Ruby hacking saw me find RegExr which helps you build and test regular expressions, as […]
Watching/tailing multiple log files at the same time with Ruby’s NET::SSH library
A good testing habit when working with web apps is to monitor the log files of servers as you test. In some cases this is easy, especially where there’s a single application server. With the trend toward more service-oriented architectures, and server clusters for high-traffic applications, the environments I’m working in tend to have many […]