Efficient and Reliable UI automation without Selenium

I have been experiencing satisfaction over UI automation efforts after a half-decade of my work in automation. The reason is new age tools like Jest and Enzyme.

No more relying on selenium for checking UI
No more relying on long execution times to verify screens
No more worrying about different drivers and browser versions
No more inspection and formation of dynamic xpaths

My emphatic outburst is based on real client experience. I have been able to execute 100s of tests under a minute. Thats something not imagined in selenium world. Typical Test Automation Pyramid has unit tests at bottom, services tests in middle and most of UI testing in terms of acceptance tests at top.

This pyramid works well in most of cases and is good compromise to hedge risk against functional issues. UI is presumed to be relatively stable once functionality is designed and we live optimism that this is taken care of.

But since advent of Node and thereby isomorphic apps, UI has become intelligent enough to render on client based on different states/workflows and conditions. On same lines, there is rise in tools that mimic JQuery within virtual DOM and get rendered HTML. THis can then be easily verified. There is also limited UI interaction available within rendered HTML which allows you to test client side validations to a good extent.

This really takes off a major load of verifying UI pages and texts thereon. Thats the good and straight part.

Challenging part is that such apps depend on lot of server responses which are mocked in such tests. There lies real craft on organization of such mock responses as well as ingesting any real world change in those mock responses.

Once this challenges are taken care of, I am sure you(and Product team) will enjoy the fruits of Test Automation!!!

Internationalization and Localization Testing

Currently I have started working on Internationalization (I18N) and Localization (L10N) for one of the projects. Seems this is new world. Difference between two is very thin and overlaps most of the time. To put it neatly and carefully, I18N is testing of software to ensure that it is not tightly coupled to any locale/language features. L10N is testing of software with particular locale. As it comes out, I18N is followed by L10N. So first we have to check whether the software is ready to adapt new locale and when we are sure it is adaptable, then we test with specific locale. So L10N can uncover most of the defects which I18N cannot. But thorough I18N testing could provide good ground of L10N, effectively reducing the work required. Further, Together it is known as Globalization(G11N). So don’t get confused with third type of testing G11N.

When we started to work on these, Unicode, character set, UTF etc. terms were coming around often. So time to look at what it is. Its been quite a time for me to have moved from development now, so have to look at these concepts. What I very hazily remember is that there is ASCII charset which is quite limited to produce lot of characters used worldwide. So Unicode, a non profitable organization have started to put international standard in charset. UTF-8 is one of that standards. UTF known as Unicode Transformation Format, comes in three flavours. UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32. UTF-8 is more popular as it is backward compatible with ASCII.

You can read more about UTF-8 on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8 .

Next blog topic I will try to put what are questions one should ask while starting to put through the strategy for G11N testing.

Go Kiss the World

Few weeks ago when I was just wandering at Crosswords(my favourite hangout place before movie at City Pride, Kothrud) for some good books. I came across the title which I thought should aptly quench my thirst for soul searching. "Go Kiss the World" was it. My intuition was correct and after reading this book, I feel it could lie on my bedside for more readings. Subroto Bagchi has presented his life journey in a very simple manner(as he has lived his life). Basically the book is all about observation in and around our existence on physical, emotional and spiritual level. The story offers a good resonance of the situations around us and what we could learn from them or simply be aware of them. There may be many incidents in book to which you could connect or may be your mind have registered sub-consciously, but you have not done little brooding on it. Subroto puts through his writings, to what we can take out from them.

Simply put it I loved this book and would recommend anyone doing or not doing soul-searching. Favourite liner "Open your mind before you open mouth".

Making Difference in Mid-Tier Service testing

Working on mid-tier services testing, I have experienced a couple of challenges that I feel worth noting.

The kind of services I tested included components having a heavy business logic and loosely coupled from UI and some which dint have much logic but were was tightly coupled by UI. On the first case, there were many scenarios that could be easily identified since they are very much, in between, hanging in the air. So the point is that they were not idenified during normal functional testing and there was lot of window for services testing.

Coming on the second scenario of having the services coupled with UI, it was difficult for me to identify quality scenarios since the major ones were taken up by UI functional testing. There was detailed discussion between me and person doing functional testing. It was understood that I was executing the same test cases which the former person was doing. Towards some point of discussion it was felt that doing the same task twice has no relevance. But I gradually comprehended,during course of discussion, that there might be cases where there is some data manipulation between UI and services. Or It could happen that some range of data is not fed as input to services tier as it does not include business requirement(but could logically make sense to have the tier work correctly for that data range). These are two places I feel, there would be some difference in making services tier robust.

Saving the Children

Let's ponder over how children deprived of essentials of life suffer and think, Let's help them in some way in one life time. Also you can become fan of following facebook link www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/Save.The.Children.Everyone?ref=mf and contribute in number of ways possible.

As Sun rises in the east,
N I see sky thru wink,
Wid wish to be sleepy,
Wid wish to see more night,
I don't wanna rise,
I don't wanna open my eyes.

But Sun ll be on my head,
N I ll walk on my knees,
I ll smell only waste,
I ll eat with the flies.

So I start to raise my voice,
to beg enough and suffice,
As I see those gifted kids,
who wipes morsels from the lips,
I see up to the sky
to ask the question ''Why?"

Now, they see my bare chest,
they see my broken legs,
they see my dusty hands,
they see my shabby face,

Wid the eyes full of pity,
finally they offer me a penny,
World changed for them,
but for me,
It remained the same.

Wid handful of pennies,
Wid pennyful of belly,
I m now weak to be wild,
n I ll turn to die,
Before I breathe my last,
I just wanna you ask,

"Will you save me?"

Web Services Testing with SoapUI

Its been a month since I have started to work on web services testing. Worked on couple of tools as OpenSTA and SoapUI as head start. Though OpenSTA is not a WS testing tool but its free, so I had evaluated it. What I understand now that it requires lot of scripting overhead to fill the gap for comprehensive WS testing. Working with SoapUI has been sheer fun as it involves combination of scripting and tools. SoapUI with its powerful groovy capabilities can be used for Soap and Non-Soap services testing. Groovy capabilities can used to make own framework which might take a bit of time, but that would be suiting to requirements. If the automation project is not large scale or is kind of one-time job, its better to use SoapUI.

The testing of services has finally opened for me, the avenues to xml and web services. Before coming to Soap, I came across the REST. From my understanding REST is just a way of styling URL. The URL below could be followed for more reading http://rest.elkstein.org/ .

Though I have got across most of the challenges using the tool, reporting remains my nightmare. Core reason was that TestStep doesn't expose any method to return the results. The other worst thing was http request test step. Generating the session ids required for login modules was something I couldn't get my head around. I hope to get this out of the way and get full structure of test automation working.

NextIT Strategies

Its been quite a time, programming in C++,VB, ASP.Net, Java and most of contemporaries. So it was time to call off coding and to go further in design of systems. While pursuing Masters in LSE-London, the only “sub-subject” I loved was IT strategy. This was something quite close to my interests after couple of years of coding. So now after few months of graduating, I had a look at what are future technologies IT-execs are looking at. So I came across this page, showing important strategic technologies.

1. Virtualization
2. Cloud Computing
3. Servers – Beyond Blades
4. Web Oriented Architectures
5. Enterprise Mashups
6. Specialised Systems
7. Social Software and Systems
8. Unified Communication
9. Business Intelligence
10. Green IT

Well, all certainly look futuristic. From Virtualization to Green IT, strategies are in direction of minimal usages(power, space, resources) and maximum output. I thought to have a look on few. Many organizations, one like IBM has started quickly gearing up towards BI and forming different knowledge grids which can be used for developing better e-governing systems. Green IT among all these seems to be the need of hour as well as good branding strategy. As you watch news indicating dangers of consumption of large amount of energies, it becomes inevitable for IT execs to consider this strategy and start mulling over it. Data centers are quite the first point to start with. Though I am all ears to hear Cloud Computing(SaaS, PaaS, IaaS) noise, but it seems that large organizations will watch its acceptance by SME’s first and will not enter during its infancy. Though few like Sungard has already adopted and delivered systems on these models, it’s still some time to scale on it. Cloud Computing is though, bound to be pervasive in near future. Enterprise Mashups, are already in market since the inception of social networking sites. The road ahead certainly looks, and seems to be good playground for Strategic players as it was for developers in last couple of decades.