“Experiences of Test Automation” is a compilation of experiences in the field that is hard to read from end to end but serves well as a reference for experienced readers by providing examples of approaches, obstacles and solutions in a variety of domains and technologies as well as insightful overviews from the authors.
There are several components in an ASP.NET MVC 3 web app – models, controllers, route-handlers, views, html-helpers, client-side code etc. Most of these can be unit-tested, others need integration tests, and several good practices can help you keep your tests more maintainable and avoid making them brittle.
Much of the generally accepted agile literature will advise you that the best way to capture your user's needs is through examples encoded into automated tests - "automated acceptance tests". Thought-leader Jim Shore says maybe not, while others still challenge him.
Is slicing stories in horizontal tasks an Agile Smell? Is this common habit used in Scrum/Agile Planning meetings - hurting a team's focus on customer value? What is being suggested instead?
Stabilization sprints are an additional number of sprints added to the end of the normal development cycle before shipping the product. As the name suggests, they’re usually added to shake down the product one last time and drive the last of the bugs. Do they belong in Agile environment or should "Done" be enough.
Automated tests that are brittle and expensive to maintain have led to companies abandoning test automation initiatives, according to Dale Emery. In a newly published paper, Dale shares some practical ways to avoid common problems with test automation. He starts with some typical automation code and evolves in ways that make it more robust, and less expensive to maintain.
Unit Testing Time and Dates is an often talked about problem with relatively simple solutions. More difficult is the acceptance/system testing with Time. What strategies are used?
A group of people interested in improving the state of the art in Automated Functional Test Tools gathered for an annual workshop the Sunday before Agile 2009. Among the topics covered: Lightening Talk demos of various tools, Porting Cucumber to .NET, Documenting existing functional test tool capabilities in a spreadsheet and the limits of Capture/Playback tools.
Rajneesh Namta shares the lessons he’s learned while automating software tests on a recent Agile project. The techniques he recommends illustrate how the Agile principles we follow when building software apply equally as well to building an automated regression test suite: start small, build iteratively and incrementally, prioritize, focus on value, work transparently, respond quickly to change.
In the last couple of years terms like Specification by Example, Executable Specifications and Feature Injection have showed up quite frequently in the community, often in relation to Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) or tools like Cucumber or SpecFlow. InfoQ have talked to some of the leading experts in this domain about what these practices are and how they relate to BDD.
Elisabeth Hendrickson describes the Agile Alliance Functional Testing Tools Group (AAFT) as a community that is helping to foster and create the next generation of functional testing tools. In this interview at Agile 2008, she tells us about the current state and the current needs of the Agile community around functional testing tools beyond FIT and FITNesse.
