Testing through the Credit Crunch - Part 4 - Value Open Source

By now you will have hopefully realised that running a Test Department doesn't have to be expensive. We have seen that by making the entire company responsible for the quality of the product we take the strain off us doing the developers jobs and lets us find those show stopper bugs.

In this post I am going to discuss why you should value open source tools to automate finding those showstoppers.

Lets start at the small thing to be tools we need at the beginning:

Continuous Integration

How many time in the past have you released something and then suddenly have to roll back the release because not everything works together. Continuous Integration Servers get code out of the source repository. I am a big fan of Subversion as a source reprository, which just happens to be open source!

The top CI server application out there are CruiseControl, Cruise Control.NET, Hudson and TeamCity. 3 of those 4 are Open Source. The one that is not open source, TeamCity, requires a you pay for a licence if you want all the bells and whistles. You should be able to manage on the free version of TeamCity if that the one you decide on.

One of the most important features of all these tools is the ability to automatically run the unit tests that have been created by the developers.

Unit Testing

The de facto testing tools for Unit Testing are NUnit, JUnit and TestNG for .NET and Java. There are loads more out there, like unittest for python, that are used all the time. These tools are great for integrating into Continuous Integration Servers.

In the 2nd post of the series I mentioned that having unit tests allows us to have a safety net to work against. The CI servers will run every developers unit test. This allows developers to do a check-in/commit, once their tests pass, and then get the rest of the tests run. This means that if you make a change you will find out if you have by accident broke something. You will learn to appreciate this safety net but make sure that you don't become lazy and use that as your only testing.

Functional Testing

Web applications have the largest amount of Automation tools for functional testing. Since I also work in this industry I will be very biased towards the following applications.

• Selenium
  Selenium is slowly becoming the test tool of choice for Rich Internet Applications. Selenium allows you to write functional tests against AJAX applications. Selenium is used by the top Internet application companies and Agile Consultants.
  
  Its developed using JavaScript and can work in all Browsers on any OS. As you would have noticed I am a big fan!
  
• Watir
  Developed in Ruby its has a very good following. Test Scripts need to be developed in Ruby and you just import Gems for the Browser that you want to test.
  
  I found that it needed a lot of work to test multiple browsers compared to Selenium. I know some people would say its easier to use that Selenium. I guess its down to the user.
  

Acceptance Testing

More and more companies are starting to use acceptance testing tools to capture their requirements. Acceptance test frameworks can all integrated into Continuous Integration Servers. They take a plain text requirement and turn it into a Test Fixture.

• Fit
• FitNesse
• Concordion

The main tool for acceptance in my opinion is a manual tool commonly known as the customer. Remember that customers are both internal and external to the company! End users are the best acceptance testers as they are the subject matter experts and spot bugs quite quickly.


In the next post of the series I will discuss Visualization of Testing

Testing through the Credit Crunch - Part 1 - Development Environments

The credit crunch has gripped the world and not so long ago Gartner suggested that the investment in technology was going to drop. They have dropped the increase in spending from 5.8% down to 2.3%. This may not seem a lot but when companies spend millions on IT each year it adds up very quickly. Unfortunately past experience has shown that testing departments are the ones who suffer first.

More employers are predicting a rise in redundancies in the UK and the other week a politician predicted a run on British Pound.

This doesn't mean all doom and gloom for IT professionals. Over the next few weeks I am going be writing a series of posts with some best practices that I have found. Lets start this series by discussing the Environments we build and test software.

Environments

This is a very ambiguous term so lets split it into the 2 main things I mean. Development Methodology and Testing Environments.

Development Methodology

When creating products it is starting to become common practise to follow Total Quality Management (TQM). The idea is to make sure that quality is in every process of the organisation. By moving to your company to this principle you will be adding confidence to your product to all stakeholders. More confidence in your stakeholders will mean that your department will get a little more funding and since its the credit crunch it must be good!

A lot of companies actually practise this without realising it. The main thing to take away from TQM is that everyone in the company has a part to play in the quality of the product that is delivered!

Agile or Not!

My first few jobs were at financial institutions and thought it was normal to do testing at the end. I worked as a WinRunner Automated Tester. I then started working on some Open Source projects in Java and was asked "Can we see your unit tests? Did you use JUnit?".
I answered quite sheepishly "I tested it by checking that it did what it needed. I don't have any JUnit tests."

Obviously my code got rejected because it wasn't neat and didn't have proper unit tests. There was a few other issues that they raised and to be honest if I was doing the code review I would have rejected it too!

Now I work for an ASP/ SaaS and we do a little Agile. I have been able to see the value of being agile while developing software. The main thing that I have learnt is that Technical/Design debt is something that is inherently low in an Agile Evironment.

Technical debt is the idea that when you release software you go into debt. If you have cut corners it will affect the level of debt you have. If you leave these items in your code it will start gaining interest on your debt. So if you have any TODO's in there that is interest on your debt. If you have poorly designed interfaces then you have added interest on your debt. Putting testing at the end of a project will definitely add interest to your debt! Doing tests at the beginning of the development process will bring down the "interest" accrued against your debt in the development process.

So to help us get through this credit crunch we need to bring down the debt in our software. The best way to do this in my opinion is to achieve this is to move your development team to a Test Driven Development way of thinking. As I said above if you place your tests earlier in the process you will lessen your technical debt. The simple rule when it comes to testing is the earlier you test the cheaper it is to solve bugs. So putting in automated tests at the beginning of the development process will go far in bring down your actual development costs for that project but also for future developments.


In the next post I will discuss further the value of Test Driven Development.

Selenium Grid - Why is this the way of the future?

Update: If you are looking for a Selenium Grid Tutorial I have put it here

I have been working with Selenium Grid since Philippe Hanrigou and others at ThoughtWorks released it at the end of last year. I knew then that it was going to become the standard way for automated GUI web application testing.

As an application it has great potential since it is has all the best bits of Selenium but it does multiple browsers in parallel. Suddenly your testing that used to take n units of time to run are taking 1/n to run. As a practitioner you can get things done quicker, as a manager you can get things done for cheaper! Everyone is a winner.

The other thing that makes the grid work well, and this is a thing that makes Selenium Remote Control work brilliantly, is the ability to use any language to control the test. People use Java, Ruby, .Net, Python and many more to create their test scripts and run it with the appropriate client. If you have the appropriate client application like TestNG for Java or DeepTest for Ruby or PNUnit for .Net you can start running tests with one script in parallel. The one limitation toof using these test tools is that you only really have one browser application, like Firefox, being tested at a time. This is because you only have one instance of the Selenium object in your code.

The way that I have got around this is to have many instances of the Selenium object in my code that each control a certain type. This type could be Internet Explorer 7 on Vista or Firefox 2 on XP.

An example of this would be (Note: I use c# to create my tests and then run them with NUnit)

[Setup]
public void setup(){
//Vista IE7 Instance
VistaIE7selenium = new DefaultSelenium("hub", 4444, "IE7 on Vista", "http://testserver");

//XP Firefox2 Instance
XPFirefox2selenium = new DefaultSelenium("hub",4444 , "Firefox2 on XP", "http://testserver");
XPFirefox2selenium.Start();
}


[Test]
public void GridTest(){
VistaIE7selenium.Open("/index.html");
XPFirefox2selenium.Open("/index.html");
}

As you can see it has the ability to create multiple instances of Selenium and then run them. This then leaves the handling of the Selenium Remote Control up to the Grid. As Philippe says, "It allows you to gridify your tests".

The negatives of Selenium Grid is that its still a work in progress. I know, thats hardly a reason to call it a negative. There are also a number of bugs but its growing section of OpenQA.org so give it a chance! I have 7 Selenium Remote Control instances running against my Grid (all virtualised with MS Virtual Server and WMWare) and I haven't had many issues. I have hooked Selenium Grid into our CruiseControl.NET server to test all the different browsers. I still have a lot of work to do with this but I know that it will be worth it in the end!

If you want to automate web testing and you want to do it efficiently use Selenium Grid! It will make your life a lot easier!