Blog Posts

TL;DR with JSoup either switch off document pretty printing or use textNodes to pull the raw text from an element.

Fusion Meetup in Birmingham March 2017

At the Fusion Meetup in Birmingham on March 23rd I presented a deep dive talk in how we automate applications to support testing.

I was told the meetup was for developers. I took that to mean that I could go as technical and quickly as I want. So I did.

Title: A Technical Deep Dive into Practical Test Automation

Synopsis:

In this talk I’m going to focus on the technical aspects of ’test automation’, using examples of approaches from a variety of Agile projects where we automated APIs, and GUIs. You’ll learn about the use of abstractions and how to think about modeling the system in code to support automating it. Also how to use these abstractions to support stress testing, exploratory testing, ongoing CI assertions and the testing process in general. I’ll also discuss the different styles of coding used to support automating tactically vs automating strategically.

Test Focus Groups - London March 2017

At the Test Focus Groups] March 2017 held near Heathrow, London, I hosted the three Devops and QA sessions.

The sessions were recorded so hopefully I will be able to link to more material in the future. I didn’t make many notes because the discussions were pretty fluid and flowed well.

Devops

I hosted a “Devops and QA” session. We had a mix of participants ranging from people who were actively working on DevOps and people who were interested.

TL;DR A potentially contentious post where I describe how I’ve survived without writing a lot of Java main methods, and how learning from code that is often driven by a main method has not helped some people. I do not argue for not learning how to write main methods. I do not argue against main methods. I argue for learning them later, after you know how to code Java. I argue for learning how to use test runners and built in features of maven or other build tools to execute your @Test code.

TLDR; older computing books and papers have a lot of really useful information - read them. Programming has an ’easy to automate’ level called ‘coding’, with a similar relationship to ’testing’ that ‘checking’ has. Assert as well as Check. Developing includes Testing and Programing and other stuff.

TLDR; You can learn to detect ambiguity and then weaponize it for your testing. Do you think I meant that? What else could I mean?

UKStar 2017

I spoke at the UKStar 2017 London, 27th - 28th February 2017.

This was a ‘conversation’ session. A new type of session that UKStar are trying out. Basically - take two speakers who submitted complimentary sessions. Let them talk for 15 minutes each and have a conversation amongst each other and the audience to discuss the topic.

The topic I submitted was “What does technical enough mean?” and the conversation is titled “Automation and people”

TLDR; Ruthlessly look at your process and incrementally improve your efficiency. Take the same attitude when testing and developing and harness MVP as often as you can.

TLDR; Where to test? Can you isolate the functionality? If so, test the isolation most heavily. Then look to see what integrates, and how it integrates. Then test the integration as heavily as the ‘how’ requires.

TLDR; RestMud has JUnit Unit @Test coverage, functional integration testing, REST API testing with Jsoup and Gson, Bots for multi-user and model based testing, Postman and GUI based exploratory testing.