Posted by Cirilo Wortel in the late evening: November 2nd, 2011
Last week I joined the QA&TEST conference in the beautiful town of Bilbao. In this post I’ll give an impression of some of the presentations I attended to and the idea’s I picked up. Most valuable sessions I attended were “Pushing the Boundaries of User Experience” by Julien Harty and “Automated Reliability Testing via hardware interfaces” by Bryan Bakker. Read about it in more detail in the article.
Posted by Vincent Partington mid-morning: October 20th, 2011
Over the past five to ten years, continuous integration has become a no-brainer for every medium to large scale software development project. It’s hard to imagine going back to not having every commit (or push) automatically trigger a build of the code and, most importantly, a test run of of the code. That test run will surely include unit tests, but setting it up to also run integration tests used to be harder. You’ll need to automatically deploy the application to the target middleware environment and then run the integration tests against that environment.
The Deployit plugin for the new 3.3 release of Atlassian Bamboo adds the enterprise-scale deployment capabilities of XebiaLabs Deployit to Bamboo. This allows you to speed up your development process by adding automated deployment to your continuous integration setup and make the the first step towards continuous deployment and continuous delivery. Instead of deployment being a bottleneck to your development process, it will be be an integrated part of it. You can test your application on the target platform as soon as possible, find any platform incompatibility and deployment issues early on, and, when it’s time to deploy to the production environment, your deployment will be quick and reliable.
Posted by Michaël van Leeuwen just before lunchtime: August 10th, 2011
When working on a mobile Android application, I was confronted with the fact that the backend server wasn’t available yet to deliver the REST service. But I needed a server or good dummy for testing the Android client against the REST services. So I began my search for a REST mock server.
I started out using the SoapUI REST functionality, but that still lacks a good implementation for my purpose of reacting on REST calls. I ended up with a 10-minute build-your-own REST mock using the Play framework. This blogs describes how this was accomplished.
Posted by Arno den Hond in the late afternoon: July 6th, 2011
As pointed out in an earlier post the importance of testing can not be understated.
In this post we will delve into BDD of Android apps.
There are a number of other testing tools for Android out there, such as Robolectric and Calculon. Robolectric improves the speed of running the test by executing it outside of the emulator. Calculon is a DSL for testing views and activities. As Robotium seems to most mature and reliable, it is my preference.
Posted by Maarten Winkels in the early evening: June 23rd, 2011
Tonight in one of our knowledge exchange sessions, one of my colleagues challenged us to writing a TagCloud in JavaScript. He had prepared a nice setup with a server producing twitter hashtags over a WebSocket to the browser and using Processing.js to produce a graphical representation of the tags zooming by on twitter. Since he had already done all the heavy lifting in integrating all these fancy new frameworks, what was left to do, you might ask. Well, we still needed to implement the algorithm to count the number of tags on the continuous stream, sorting this list on the bases of the counts and making sure the system wouldn’t run out of memory by removing less used tags in some smart way. His point to all of this was, that although JavaScript is being prophesized in some circles as the new-old-new language of the future, writing and testing a non-trivial algorithm in it is a big challenge.
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Posted by Mark Bakker at around evening time: June 22nd, 2011
In my current position as Performance Engineer and in my past position as a Middleware Architect I did quite some work with closed source performance monitoring and analysis tools (i.g. CA Wily and later AppDynamics).
These tools are both expensive but also do quite a good job most of the times. In the same field there are more tools, but all in the same price range for as far as I know.
To name some: Foglight, Dynatrace, Newrelic, JXInsight, Tivoli Performance Viewer, Compuware Gomez.
Around 2006 several initiatives to create open source performance monitoring tools for java production environments started to appear.
This was mainly because AOP (Aspect Oriented Programming), the technology used in most of these products, was getting attention in the market and there were quite some developments in that area at the time.
I am interested to see how the open source community around these kind of products is evolving. The outcome is quite surprising…
Posted by Arjan Molenaar in the early morning: June 1st, 2011
In the first installment on Xebium, Cirilo explained the ideas behind this FitNesse fixture:
Xebium creates a simple way to use Selenium IDE (low learning curve) and FitNesse (ease of maintenance) to it’s fullest when it comes to maintaining a web application test suites.
Xebium is using the same keywords as Selenium IDE. This has the huge advantage that no person should learn another DSL. Since tests are stated this way, they can be copied between Selenium IDE and FitNesse without a hassle (the FitNesse formatter for Selenium IDE is rather trivial). And to be honest: as long as there are XPath and Regular Expressions in the code, it makes no sense to come up with a substitute for verifyText
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Posted by Cirilo Wortel in the late afternoon: May 4th, 2011
Introduction
When testing web interfaces, it’s convenient to use an intuitive tool like Selenium IDE, it’s easy to use and can be used by non-technical people, but it is solely meant for record and playback of test-scripts. One of its limitations is that it misses sufficient options for documenting and managing tests. Furthermore it misses an interface with the backend of the system under test (SUT), to setup preconditions for a test or for instance to manipulate or read from a database.
Fitnesse is a great tool to do just that, it has the Wiki to manage tests and it by default has a setup and teardown mechanism, it’s easy to add non invasive testfixtures to interface directly with your SUT. The downside is that it is incapable of doing webtests.
We now have the glue that combines the two, it’s called Xebium!
Posted by Robert van Loghem just before lunchtime: March 23rd, 2011
Last time I explained why I think doing TDD for mobile is imperative, and why I do it. But now it’s time to get technical, and explain to you how to set up, GHUnit in XCode 4 and run unit tests, not only in the iPhone and iPad simulator but also on your own physical device!, it’s in text and images but also in video form on YouTube.
Note, if you want to know why i chose GHUnit over OCUnit, just scroll down to the end of the post.
Posted by Robert van Loghem around lunchtime: March 9th, 2011
Since a couple of months I’ve been developing mobile applications, some are for the business at home (girlfriend-shopping-list app that actually works and augmented reality garden iPad app) and some are for work. I have experienced that TDD and Continuous testing (Test Driven Development) is a way of working that leads to fewer bugs and regression problems and better design in my software, it’s my preferred way of programming, not testing.
And to start off, here’s how I benefit from doing TDD:
- Robust
- Better code design, no really!
- Find regression problems early on
and you can read more on TDD and Continuous testing here.
The thing is, writing a mobile app takes about 20% of the time it would take me to write a web+client+server based app. Which of-course is really nice, because I can write lots of apps. It also means that whenever i need to fix a bug or add new functionality, I need to have developed it in a TDD fashion, otherwise i cannot guarantee reliability. So let me explain why…