Category: Test Tools
Another Australian context-driven blog
May 14, 2008
Alister Scott, an Australian tester located in Brisbane has started a blog. There are a few Watir samples, and it’s always nice when a test automator puts their code up for scrutiny. I know my plans to do the same have taken far too long. Check his writing out at http://watirmelon.wordpress.com/
Rapid testing, risk catalogues and checklists – Windows testing ideas
January 17, 2008
Many moons ago, when I was a young tester, I worked on the first third party game for Microsoft (Please don’t look for it, it’s terrible). But there was some good to come out of the experience. Windows ’95 was new shiny, and fraught with danger. To help address some of this, I began collecting […]
More on Tiny MCE and value threats
October 8, 2007
In response to Matt’s comment on the robustness of my Tiny MCE Watir solution, I’d like to point out that the main threat to the solution’s value for me is that I can no longer run the automation in the background. Send_keys seems to need the IE window to be the topmost window. A lot […]
Attention, attention…
September 10, 2007
The concept of inattentional blindness has been, if you’ll excuse the unintended pun, brought to the testing world’s attention lately by Cem Kaner and James Bach. Sajjadul Hakim has written recently on an exploratory testing experience in which he attributed failure to observe a bug to inattentional blindness. While this may have been the cause, […]
Big XML files, REXML and learning about stream parsers
June 27, 2007
After taking the easy route and building some XML check test scripts using Ruby and REXML’s DOM access, I decided that I really didn’t want my computer grinding to a halt for a whole day while it parsed a gig and a half of XML. So it was time to try a streaming parser. Unfortunately, […]
Ruby, windows, command lines and problems
June 6, 2007
I’ve been building tools for web service testing using Ruby and its SOAP libraries. I hope to write more on this later, but for now, a pointer to a simple problem that took up far too much time. My test toolkit has three small programs, each providing different services. The first can be passed a […]
Nifty…
May 8, 2007
Here’s a cool little tester-valuable link courtesy of Mike Kelly‘s Rational Functional Tester tutorials: http://labs.google.com/sets Generate test data, or ideas if you’re stuck.
Sorry!
April 17, 2007
I thought I was done with ranting about automation tools for a while, but I couldn’t resist this quote from my former boss’ blog: “Tools that let programmers create software by manipulating icons and graphics shapes on screen have a long and sometimes successful history… But these have generally served as layers of shortcuts on […]
More Joys of Vendorscript
April 10, 2007
Someone recently suggested to me that the selection of VBScript for an automation language is because it’s easier for testers. This is slightly rant-y, but I promise there are a few helpful tips in here just to make up for a mild dose of language-warring. Exhibit A. I can understand that there’s a chance that […]
On corporately mandated tools and vendorscripts…
March 20, 2007
I have been riding the ups and downs as I transfer my previous test automation framework learnings to one of the big vendor automation tools. I’d resisted criticism, but today I have to say, loudly, it sucks. Rather than waste my energy, I simply direct you to read this (http://adamv.com/dev/articles/hatevbs/) (make sure you follow the […]