Agile Trailblazers Blog

Cucumber, Selenium and Gherkin have become popular tools for helping teams implement test automation or what is often referred to as Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD) or Behavior Driven Development (BDD). By running your tests locally, you can ensure your application runs as expected on your OS/Browser setup, but to truly know that the app works on other configurations, you need a way to emulate numerous environments. SauceLabs is a web service that you can sign up to which will give the ability to test on many OS/Browser setups, including numerous mobile options.

In this article, we will cover:

1. Why Use SauceLabs?
2. Connecting Your Tests to SauceLabs
3. Parameterize your Rake File to Pass in Platform and Browser
4. Using a Secure Tunnel to Access Your Internal Application

In this article series we use Ruby as the implementation language (and we recommend Ruby when there is no other existing preference). However, these examples will translate easily to other languages like Java. 

If you are not familiar with Selenium, Cucumber and Gherkin take a look at our related introductory blog "The 5 Step Guide for Selenium, Cucumber, and Gherkin" and "Rake Up and Optimize Your Tests"

Cucumber, Selenium and Gherkin have become popular tools for helping teams implement test automation or what is often referred to as Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD) or Behavior Driven Development (BDD). As you grow your test suite and as it becomes larger and more complex, you may find your test project becomes bloated and messy. This article will lay out steps you can take to optimize your test organization and ways to provide unmeasured flexibility in running different tests on different browsers.

In this article, we will cover:

1. 'Tagging' Tests for better organization
2. 'Hook' up your tests with @Before and @After hooks
3. 'Support' your test organization with the Support folder
4. 'Rake' up your cucumber statements with a Rakefile

In this article series we use Ruby as the implementation language (and we recommend Ruby when there is no other existing preference). However, these examples will translate easily to other languages like Java.

We developers live in an object oriented world where data is represented as objects in our applications. However, these applications often end up saving their data in SQL databases which are relational, not object oriented. This often causes translation errors and could cost you and your team significant time tracing and debugging. Understanding keys, relationships, and cardinality are essential skills for any developer to be able to create and maintain reliable, consistent, and efficient applications by being able to create and read data models and spot potential problems before they become major bugs.

JIRA Portfolio is a powerful tool which provides an easy way to manage one or more teams' backlogs and schedule work for months at a time. Portfolio for JIRA 2.0, which was just recently released, brings many useful changes including an easy startup wizard to create a new plan, powerful forecasting tools, and a much tighter integration with your JIRA Boards. Learning to use Portfolio 2 could be a challenge for both experienced Portfolio users as well as JIRA users thinking of trying Portfolio for the first time. Either way, this guide will walk you through setting up and getting started with Portfolio 2.