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.

Cucumber, Selenium and Gherkin have become popular tools for helping teams implement test automation - what is often referred to as Acceptance Test Driver Development (ATDD) or Behavior Driven Development (BDD).  In this article we will cover some more advanced features of Selenium and Cucumber and show how to environmentalize your test framework so you can run the same tests against different environments or browsers.  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".

Want to Performance test your web Applications? Then you should know about Apache JMeter.

What is Apache JMeter?

 It is a 100% pure Java application and Open Source testing software .It was designed for  load, stress, functional, performance testing.  It requires JDK 5 or higher.

What is performance testing ?

 Performance testing is the process of determining the speed or effectiveness of a computer, network, Software program or device. In this process involve quantitative tests done in a lab, such as measuring the response time or the number of MIPS (millions of instructions per second) at which a system functions. Qualitative attributes such as reliability, scalability and interoperability may also be evaluated. Performance testing is often done in conjunction with stress testing.

Selenium Grid is a powerful tool for testing web applications across browsers and operating systems, but incorporating it into a Continuous Integration pipeline can be frustrating. Integrating the Grid with a CI/CD server is complex, and a misstep during setup can lead to unreliable test errors, and down that path lies madness. Here at AgileTrailblazers, we use the Selenium Grid plugin for Jenkins to quickly execute our UI tests on every build against multiple operating systems and browsers, so front-end bugs are squashed early.

Teams are an intricate balance of skills, cooperation, leadership and willingness to go the extra mile to make a quality product. Each grouping has individuals with specific roles and responsibilities, as well as a chain of command to help guide the team to success. Within a testing team, the QA Engineer plays an integral part that helps testing run smoothly and ensures that all projects are thoroughly evaluated.

Although the QA Engineer isn't the top dog in the team, he or she does report to the QA Manager. The person in the QA Engineer role essentially takes the requirements and test strategies and generates test plans. But that's not all. These individuals also execute these tests, leverage QA testing tools to report issues and analyze test results to mitigate problems and create better tests. This is obviously an important position to be in, but many don't fully understand what capabilities are needed. Let's take a look at some of the essential skill requirements for a QA engineer:

• Communication
• Product Understanding
• Coding and Creativity
• Automation

In Agile Testing, you want to adhere to the testing pyramid when designing your automated tests. For this discussion, I will be focusing on the bottom tier of the pyramid, Unit Tests, where you want to have the largest percentage of your tests.   

The lack of built-in test support for JIRA can feel like a strange omission. Luckily, there are multiple JIRA plugins that add testing support to JIRA, the most popular of which is Zephyr. However, JIRA and Zephyr are extremely flexible tools, and getting their full value requires a team understanding of testing practice, and integrating those practices into JIRA.

Now that you are hopefully convinced that you want your organization to be steeped in a Culture of Commitment, how do you infuse the CofC in your company’s DNA? The “Culture of Commitment enabling” markers your teams need to strive for are depicted below.

Welcome to our Interview Series! In this Series, we ask questions that you submit through our social media channels to our consulting practice leaders.