Job posting:
Can improved automobile tyres really make the world a better place? Should we trust developers the one to change the tyres?
To be honest, probably better than me: the last time I changed a tire, I cross-threaded two of the lug nuts and then snapped one of them off (with only a lug wrench, sir; I was motivated to remove that bolt). BECAUSE I BREAK THINGS.
Howard Jones “New Song”. Which is thirty-one years old, but never mind that.
Full disclosure: The mime in chains following the rock star around inspired me to get into QA.
Keep in mind your invisible meta tags display when a user shares the link in various social media forms:
In this case, I think we can agree it’s a QA fail.
I’ve been working on a Java Selenium test automation project, teaching myself Java and Selenium WebDriver along the way.
I ran into a problem that I didn’t see solved on the Internet elsewhere, but my skill at searching StackOverflow is not that good.
The problem is conducting an operation that might yield one of two results, such as success or an error message. Say you’ve got an registration form or something that can succeed if you put the right data in it or will fail if you put the wrong data in it. If the user successfully registers, a welcome page displays. If the user fails, an error message displays. And, given this is the Web, it might take some time for one or the other to display. And the implicit waits didn’t look like they’d handle branching logic.
So here’s what I did:
public int waitForOne(WebDriver driver, Logger log,
String lookFor1, String lookFor2){
WebDriverWait wait = new WebDriverWait(driver, 1);
for (Integer iterator = 1; iterator < 60; iterator++){
try{
WebElement element =
wait.until(ExpectedConditions.elementToBeClickable(By.id(lookFor1)));
return 1;
}catch (Exception e){
} // try 1
try{
WebElement element =
wait.until(ExpectedConditions.elementToBeClickable(By.id(lookFor2)));
return 2;
}catch (Exception e){
} //try 2
} //for loop
}// waitForOne
You could even create a longer list of events to wait for one of them to occur by passing in an array of strings and then using a For-Each loop to run through the list.
This sample looks for a Web element by its ID, but you could change it to use another By parameter, such as CSS Selector (cssSelector). Or, if you're feeling dangerous, you could pass in the By parameter as a string and parse it in the method to determine whether to use ID, CSS Selector, or a mix therein. But that's outside the simplicity of this example.
Also note that the For loop that limits the waiting for a total of sixty iterations, which in this case will max out at 120 seconds (at 1 second per attempt for 2 items a maximum of 60 times). You could pass the max in as a parameter when calling this method if you want. That's especially important if you're using a list of possible elements to look for. If you're passing in five elements, suddenly you're at a maximum time of five minutes if it times out completely. You might not want your tests to wait that long, especially if you're using the check multiple times per test.
I'm sure there are more elegant solutions for this. Let's hear them. Because, frankly, I'm not very good at searching StackOverflow, and I'd prefer if you'd just correct my foolishness here in the comments.
It’s been a while since we’ve had some Three Days’ Grace, so here is “I Am Machine”:
It’s been a while since we’ve had anything, actually. Perhaps I should post something.
Five Finger Death Punch, “The Wrong Side of Heaven”:
Seen on Twitter:
Engineers don't let engineers design user interfaces. pic.twitter.com/XKSDUOxKHe
— John Bellomy (@cowbs) September 28, 2014
I’ve tested applications like that, where the Web pages are filled with tabs full of edit boxes crammed into the space with inscrutable labels that, I’m assured, the users know what they mean.
Well, maybe.
Sometimes, these interface designs come straight off of some crowded paper form that a worker would fill out with pen, checking boxes and putting tic marks or numbers in boxes. On paper, this is as quick as moving your eye, moving the pen, and pressing down. With a screen, it’s a little different, as it involves tabbing or moving the mouse and clicking and then typing something, scanning the form, moving the mouse, clicking, typing some more, and so on.
Other times, these interface designs pretty directly capture what the worker saw in a mainframe application or in a terminal window connecting to a mainframe application. With Windows or Web-safe colors instead of amber text on a black background that the worker. A lot of needless tabbing because interfaces could not easily branch. If you check this box, then these blank spaces become relevant. No, paper couldn’t do that and mainframes couldn’t do that, so the new Windows or Web application won’t do that. Because the users are used to it.
However:
I read somewhere recently about hiring tester with test skills rather than domain knowledge, and sure, that’s the right balance, however, domain knowledge is what allows you to spot these sorts of problems. You might be hired because you’re a good tester, but you ought to study up on the industry whose software you’re testing. Me, I’ve been known to refresh myself on the basics of chemistry to better test chemical modeling software and to grok at least a little bit of the workflow of a warehouse when testing order fulfillment software.
Because otherwise you’re only logging the defects qua defects like “The Tare Weight edit box allows alpha characters” and not the higher level concerns about why you’d expect a worker would enter the total shipping weight before the number of items to ship.
Domain knowledge gives you the insight about the worker’s starting point in your software and what he wants to do to get done with your software. And that will give you the possible paths for his interaction without having to make all the possibilities available on one screen in tiny print.
Within Temptation, “Iron”:
Stone Sour, “Tired”:
Like a Storm, “Love the Way You Hate Me”:
Is that a didgeridoo in a rock song? Yes.
So I’m at a presentation last week, and the presenter’s got his little tablet plugged into the projector. He wanders off and starts talking to someone, and his tablet shuts off automatically after a bit.
So he goes to the tablet and looks down at it. He starts it back up, and he types his password to unlock it, and….
Because it’s a tablet, the keyboard displays onscreen and shows his key taps.
As does the projector.
So we all saw his password. On one hand, it was a strong password. On the other hand, we all saw it.
Don’t do that.
The banner on deals.ebay.com:
The same banner on the eBay Gold store (wait, you didn’t know eBay had a gold store? Neither did its testers!):
Now, why would the height of the banner be different on one page?
Because they’re different, no matter how much the same they seem.
One of the tricks of testing is recognizing how things differ in your applications and Web sites. Although the pages and features try to share code and styling whenever possible, they diverge more than it appears. As you test across features, you’ll get a sense of where different code does the same things, so you’ll learn where to test similar workflows whenever something changes.
That includes checking the styling of different pages within your site when a CSS file changes.
Whenever I see the bottom of lower cased Gs cut off in edit boxes and drop-down lists:
I know to look very closely at design elements of a Web page because the designer has not.
(The story of brown M&Ms explained here.)
Jim Holmes threw down the gauntlet on Twitter:
My thoughts on using loops in automated tests: pic.twitter.com/33sphFHuzm
— Jim Holmes (@aJimHolmes) August 28, 2014
However, don’t is such a challenge to QA.
I use loops in my automated tests for the following things:
When I want to test the same operation with different sets of data, I use a loop to jam the different set of strings into the same form.
incrementor=1 until(incrementor == number_of_rows) item = util.get_hash_from_spreadsheet(spreadsheet,incrementor) form.add(browser, item, log, filename) incrementor = incrementor +1 end
I know, with just the right database management toolset, knowledge of the database, and proper tuned queries, I could go directly to the database to add a bunch of records if I want to see what happens when a user is working on a posting with a large number of comments attached to it. I want to see how it reacts when I add another comment or when I delete the posting or a comment.
So I just run a script with it:
incrementor = 0
while(incrementor < 100)
post.go_to_post(browser,post_id, log, filename)
countbefore = comment.get_comment_count(util,browser,post_id,urlstring)
comment_text= "Comment left at "+(Time.now.strftime("%m%d%y%H%M%S"))
comment.add_comment_on_want_detail(browser, post_id, comment_text, log, filename)
countafter = comment.get_comment_count(util,browser,post_id, urlstring)
incrementor = incrementor + 1
end
Sure, we can quibble about whether this is an automated test or just a script; however, the script is testing the site's ability to handle 100 comments in a row, ainna? So it's a test and not a set-up script.
I've got a client who runs different programs for banks, and individual programs are targeted to individual bank branches. This means the client runs a spreadsheet through a data load process, and I have to test to ensure that the bank branches are exposed.
So I take a spreadsheet from the data load and run it through the automated interface tester.
incrementor = 1 until(incrementor == number_of_rows) branch = util.get_branch_from_spreadsheet(spreadsheet,incrementor) form.search(browser, branch, log, filename) incrementor = incrementor +1 end
So although you might have good reasons to not use loops in certain instances, loops do prove useful in automated tests.
Just remember, there's always an awful lot of sometimes in never.
Listen up Pollyannas of the world: A dose of pessimism may do you good.
Experts say pessimism can at times be beneficial to a person’s physical and mental well-being. Some studies have found that having a more negative outlook of the future may result in a longer and healthier life. Pessimism and optimism are opposite ends of a spectrum of personality traits, and people generally fall somewhere in between.
“All too often in the literature and in the public conversation, we want people to be more than 90% optimistic,” said Dilip Jeste, a professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at the University of California San Diego. “That’s not good. It is much better to have a balanced perspective and have some pessimistic streak in your personality in order to succeed.”
The sidebar lists four different types of pessimism. Which one is QA’s perspective? Number 5, the classified one.
Not Roxette. Shaman’s Harvest:
Today on Gmail, I got my inbox down to inbox -50:
How do you do that?
Well, in my case, I deleted a large number of emails from an unused email box and then, when it hung up, I deleted them again.
How do you test for that?
Well, if you’re me, you not only use an automated testing tool like Selenium or WATIR not only for interface checking, but to create large record sets to then use in manual testing. For example, you set up a script that adds 10,000 comments and then manually test to see what happens when you go to an item with a large number of comments. You can inspect how it looks (is the number too big for the space allocated to it on the page) but also what happens when you add another comment, when you delete the item, when you recommend the item to a friend.
One of the recurring pratfalls in testing your integration with third party widgets shared by, and updateable by, others who use it is their test data becomes available to you sometimes.
Take, for instance, testing integration with Google maps. It’s becoming harder and harder to submit a string that returns no results. Search for asdf, for example, an old tester favorite.
Someone in testing adding Google Places has added that as test data, and it’s there for all of us to see.
Why would a user do that?
None of that stopped 26-year-old Diondre J— of Slidell, who checked into Slidell Memorial Hospital on Aug. 5 under the name of her deceased sister, Delores, Slidell Police Department spokesman Daniel Seuzeneau said Wednesday.
When hospital staff attempted to put the information into the hospital’s database, an error message informed them they might have been treating a dead person. The police were contacted, and Diondre J— was stopped in the hospital parking lot.
It’s good to see someone was on the job testing to see what would happen if you tried to enter a patient’s date of treatment after the patient’s date of death.
Because sometimes a user might do that.
And by way back, I mean a couple of years. Remember this?
Of course you do. QA never forgets.
Whereas some “successful” people can forget their failures when they’ve moved on, QA cannot. Because QA has to test for all failures it has experienced in person or vicariously from now and forever more, amen.
