Agile Trailblazers Blog

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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.

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 "Getting the Most out of Cucumber, Gherkin, and Selenium"

 

Cucumber, Selenium and Gherkin have become popular tools for helping teams implement test automation or 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 the Gherkin language that can help you write tests that are simpler and more reusable.

We will cover:

1. Using Regular Expressions for Dynamic Data
2. Scenario Outlines
3. Tables as Arguments
4. Backgrounds

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".

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.

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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

I have heard it asked many times, “Where do architects fit into Agile?” But that's the wrong question.  Instead, you should be asking, "Is our architecture Agile-Ready?"

One reason for adopting Agile is to enable “flow” to breakout – meaning your organization accelerates moving business needs from the concept phase to delivering customer value in production. Agile, grounded in Lean principals, asks your teams to look at everything that does not contribute to “flow” as waste and to eliminate it. But what if your application architecture is holding you back?