At E-gineering, we’ve been using RxJava to help us handle networking (with Retrofit) and threading in Android apps due to the ease with which it handles these tasks. As a learning exercise, Nate Ridderman and I wanted to challenge ourselves to dig deeper with RxJava and get to know some additional operators. Knowing that one of the primary raison d’être and abilities of RxJava is to handle streams of events, we decided to try using it to handle touch inputs…. [continue]
Android Data Binding Subtleties
One of the things I love about being an Android developer is the amount of resources available at my fingertips on the Internet. There’s a strong community of developers sharing open source libraries, promoting design patterns, and just helping out their peers. For the last several years I’ve primarily been a consumer of these resources, but it’s time to change that! My first blog post describes the process of fixing a relatively obscure bug. I’m following the advice of @chiuki:… [continue]
Simplify Selenium Selectors
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]
Data Analytics
E-gineering partnered with a client to rebuild the reporting framework for their telephone voice response system. Their telephone response system functions differently than the traditional “voice mail” system of phone interaction and allows for a more natural and varied conversation with the user. As such they had some unique client data reporting requirements. The prior reporting solution involved batch processing production data every night to create Excel spreadsheets that were e-mailed out the following morning. While functional, the existing system… [continue]