Failing to prepare is preparing to fail. – John Wooden Writing strong automated tests comes down to preparation. (I never thought I would be drawing connections between sports and automated tests, yet here I am.) Putting in the hard work up front pays off immensely on the back end. With a solid Page Model architecture in place, writing the actual testing scripts becomes much easier. Getting to that point can be difficult but Gregg Reed’s current sequence of posts for… [continue]
Selenium Java: An Intelligent Example Part 3
In our previous post, Selenium Java: An Intelligent Example Part 2, we dug into the code. We demonstrated how everything is tied together. We outlined the BasePage, WebDriverResource, and BrowserFactory classes. In this post we will be digging into the concrete page objects themselves as well as writing a sample test that uses multiple page objects. Concrete Page Class Each concrete page class extends BasePage. Doing so provides them with everything they need to be a page object. Each web… [continue]
Selenium Java: An Intelligent Example Part 2
In our previous post, Selenium Java: An Intelligent Example Part 1, we described how to manage Technical Debt and the importance of using a Page Model. We also gave an overview of the classes used in this example project. In this post, we will be getting into the code. We will demonstrate how everything ties together and how you could build a similar project to test your application. BasePage The BasePage class is at the center of it all. It… [continue]
Selenium Java: An Intelligent Example Part 1
In our introductory post, A Survey of the Automated Testing Landscape, we defined the problems we often find in automated testing. In this series, we will walk through an intelligent example of a Selenium test project that uses common design patterns and object oriented principles to help solve the problem of Technical Debt. This is not to say that this example is the perfect solution that will solve all of your problems. Remember from the introductory post that unicorns do… [continue]
A Survey of the Automated Testing Landscape
The tools available in test automation these days are pretty amazing. The options are getting a little overwhelming. You could choose to pay for an expensive product that would make a lot of decisions for you, or you could go old-school and write everything yourself. Many companies choose to buy expensive products, because they think that will give them an advantage. They may feel that designing their automated testing environment from scratch is not feasible. Their developers are busy with… [continue]
Android UI Testing with Espresso
Android UI testing is often overlooked, although most developers know it’s something that they should be doing. It’s like eating your vegetables – it’s not a pleasant experience for some, but it helps keep everything in working order. Some reasons often heard for not adopting an automated UI testing solution for a mobile app may be: Added time ($$$) to the duration of the project Tests are unreliable Tests take a long time to complete Delays in response time from… [continue]
E-gAT: E-gineering Automated Test, part 3
Previously, on Avatar… In prior introductory posts (part 1, part 2), we covered why E-gAT is a toolkit and not a framework, dropped some philosophy around leveraging the power of an organization’s existing workforce, touted the Page Object pattern for writing automated tests, and mentioned that E-gAT is freely available on GitHub. In this post, we’d like to cover some of the technical aspects of E-gAT. Test Runner: Multi-threaded and Resource-smart Two technical aspects that we wanted to address in… [continue]
E-gAT: E-gineering Automated Test, part 2
Page Object Pattern: Smart, and… From our considerable experience in software, we’ve learned the great value of leveraging industry best practices and patterns – because the industry at large has even more considerable experience, and has a learned a thing or two! One such best practice for automated testing is the Page Object pattern. As software engineers, we saw this best practice as excellent in its own right. But we also saw an opportunity to manifest a philosophy into a… [continue]