Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Originally Published Sunday, October 11, 2009
A significant percentage of static test data is stored in tabular comma delimited or tab-delimited formats and saved in Excel spreadsheets. Reading in comma or tab-delimited static test data into an automated test is pretty straight forward and there are numerous examples in many programming languages illustrating how to [...]
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Originally Published Wednesday, September 02, 2009
Last week I talked about the silliness of wasting time calculating the return on investment (ROI) of an automation effort on any non-trivial software project; especially if it has an extended shelf-life. As my friend Joe Strazzre commented, “If you need an ROI analysis to convince business management that test [...]
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Originally Published Tuesday, August 25, 2009
I just finished reading Implementing Automated Software Testing by E.Dustin, T. Garrett, and B. Gauf and overall this is a good read providing some well thought out arguments for beginning an automation project, and provides strategic perspectives to manage a test automation project. The first chapter made several excellent points [...]
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Originally Published Saturday, August 15, 2009
My daughter made me laugh today when she offered a bit of her philosophy. She told me that her favorite candy is gummy bears “because gummy bears get stuck between your teeth, and then you can dig out a second helping with your tongue.” I never really thought of [...]
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Originally Published Saturday, August 01, 2009
When many people think of test automation they envision rudimentary scripts with hard-coded events and data that manipulate user interface objects much the same way a customer might interact with the software to accomplish a pre-defined, robot-like task. Perhaps this is the reason there is a plethora of tools available [...]
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Originally Published Thursday, May 14, 2009
Regardless of the personal opinions of a few people, the simple fact is that the demand for software testers who can design and develop effective test automation is increasing. Perhaps one reason for the distain by some folks in the industry is due to limitations of the test automation approach [...]
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Originally Published Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Last month I wrote about simplistic views of UI test automation in which some people want to pretend that recording for playback or scripting hard-coded actions and data to mimic some human’s interactions at the keyboard is an automated test. Balderdash! Automating a set of sequences or preconceived steps simply [...]
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Originally Published Thursday, March 12, 2009
There are many approaches to test automation from unit testing to system level testing through the GUI. Of course, the most often discussed approach is the automation approach that drives the GUI to perform some action; or GUI automation. This also happens to be the most controversial approach to [...]
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Originally Published Sunday, January 04, 2009
I am generally not a big fan of static data in test automation, but being a pragmatic person, I know there are clearly times when using data-driven testing is just plain common-sense. For example, data-driven testing is an effective automation approach when designing ‘black-box’ tests for testing an API.
Data-driven testing [...]
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Originally Published Tuesday, December 02, 2008
There are occasionally times during an automated test needs to create a temporary file during the execution of that test. The problem is that often this file is left behind on the system, or even worse stored in some obscure directory on a server. I say worse because those [...]