TEST THE RISK!

If you are using Capybara with Cucumber, tagging is a very efficient feature of the Cucumber for manageable test cases. Tagging can be also used for managing test environments, like @test may mean that these tests run only in the test environment so set the environment as the test for me. Likely @live may mean that these tests can run on the live environment, assume that you are applying continuous testing. You can also give the scenarios for device-specific tags, like @ihphone6_v may say these tests are for iphone6 with the vertical mode. Moreover, with tagging, you can also make an isolation strategy for running your test in parallel. Each parallel suits should have its own data like users, active records, address, credit card info, and ext. I have used the tagging for running tests in dockers. In this post, you can find some practical way of running Capybara with Cucumber in Dockers. Creating Docker Image: Dockerfile I am using Ruby version 2.3 so in Dockerfile gett

You may have heard that we are running the cases in the headless mode so that we could accelerate the execution of the test cases.  So is this true all the time? In this post, I have a little test to compare the headless mode in Chromedriver with version 2.33 and Chromedriver. The tests were run in Windows. I am using Capybara , I have around 200 test cases written in Cucumber . Tests are running parallel with 15 execution lines. This execution is controlled by tags so we can get the execution time when a tag finished. With this way, we can compare the tag specific time differences and the total time difference. I am using the following Chromedriver instances written in env.rb  file in the project. TAGS Chrome Headless DIFF signup 90.0009999275 70.003000021 22.22% login 100.000999928 80.003000021 20.00% basket_a 120.000999928 120.003000021 0.00% order_d 160.001999855 150.003999949 6.25%

If you are using Capybara and Cucumber for test automation and Jenkins for CI/CD process you can run your test over Jenkins and see the result by Cucumber Result Plugin , for more information check the plugin page . By this plugin you can also see the screenshots taken when test cases fail.  To produce the result you need to save the result of the test as .json file, you can use the following command:      cucumber features -f json -o cucumber_result.json To enable to take screenshot if a case fails you need to set the application hook  of after case. The following configuration makes it automatically. See it and change screenshot path with your path. The key point is embedding the image after taking it then reports plugin make it visible on the report. Cucumber Result Plugin Screenshot for the failed test case

One of the biggest challenge in test automation is updating existing codes. Because of the update in the development, it is very prone to have some changes for the attributes of ui elements and less likely to have some change in behaviour in actions. The second option is most of the time called as bug, otherwise if the business is changed, it could be called as a new feature. For any reasons that cause the automation code gives failures you need to update something. Sometimes I need to refresh my mind :) For easy maintenance, one of the good approach keep your codes modular. It means that each module should responsible for one job and a update problem should be solved by applying just one change in your system. Using Capybara plus Cucumber gives you this features but if you are using them professionally. For this framework, business rules are kept on Cucumber so you can update business rules from your .feature files but related update should reflect to the code. In thi

If you tend to use tools effectively, testing is easy and enjoyable. For mobile testing there are lots of challenges and to be honest if you don't push yourself to improve your ability as every developer does you can not test the mobile application good enough. Instead of testing mobile application manually, we can automate the stories whenever the stories are prepared by business analyst with writing cucumber files and then we can start writing the code of automation and finally we can run it when the stories are developed by developer for agile development environment. This is iteration based approach, means you can repeat this steps for each iteration. At the end of the milestone you can run your whole automation code and see the result. For the remaining time you can still test application by using Exploratory Testing techniques to find-out any bugs.  The important point is to make your job effective and efficient. For this you should automate or scripted some repetiti

BDD, which is stand for behaviour driven development, is created by Dan North . BDD is developed on the top of TDD, which is stand for test driven development to remove the gap of unit testing and acceptance testing. In TDD, every unit is started to be written right after defining the expectations from the units, by the unit testing. However by BDD, regarding the agile story, every unit is specified and tested in terms of desired behaviour. This 'desired behaviour' is what exactly business requires in agile stories.  BDD can be applied by the help of some tools to interpret the business 'desired behaviour' to test code. There are some tools that help this aim such as Behat  for PHP, JBhave  for Java world, and the most famous one Cucumber  for the Ruby world. In this post I want to give some points on how to effectively we can use Cucumber for a Calabash project to automate some agile stories for sample android application. Cucumber takes some keywords lik

In my previous post I explained the Cucumber Capybara and Calabash and behaviour driven development. In this post I want to explain how we can implement and run cucumber and calabash for automating test cases for android applications. If you have not set-up your environment yet, you can read this post . You should also have an android virtual devices or a real devices that is connected to your computer in debugging mode. Your android version should be higher than 2.2.  If your system is ready for testing, you can clone the repository that I created for mobile test automation purposes. Sure, it may be more sophisticated if a real android developer develop something but from this application you can have a fresh starting. git clone https://github.com/gunesmes/calabash_android_automation.git You can check the images on the github so that get information what the application is looking like. Just open the project file and  look at the two important files in feature directory: cala

Mobile test automation is just another era for test automation since the trends for mobile devices are increasing. For more sophisticated testing approach, we should apply the technics what we have learnt from the test automation for desktop/web applications. As test automation is a part of continuos development, it should be run after each commit to test environment. For mobile application we can use the same method to be more responsible.  Cucumber is used describe the test cases and it very easy to understand for anyone so we can use it for user behaviour as behaviour driven development, BDD . Capybara is a library to simulate user behaviour for just web application. However we can use Calabash for mobile test automation.  It means that we can use Calabash and Cucumber together for mobile test automations. As in Capybara, in Calabash there are not much functions to learn. It has basically, finding element, inserting text into textEdit fields, clicking and assertion function

In Poltergeist mode or headless mode, it is different from Selenium since there is no browsers which you can track failure visually. The advantages of Poltergeist are: it is faster, it demands less source when we compare to Selenium, and eventually it is more suitable for Continues Integration (CI). Installation and further information about Poltergeist you can visit git page . Running Capybara with terminal may help you to get quick result. By this way you can check if button, field, or any object can be reachable easily and this method may help you to reduce failure issue on your CI and get you more realistic results. You can just paste the following commands into your terminal, it will go to home page of Amazon.

For any automation frameworks, handling pop-ups is somehow difficult. By opening a pop-up window, the window changes so you can not control the new window with existing webdriver since it is already assigned to main windows when it was initiated.  Normally automation framework can not work if you don't switch to pop-up windows. For Capybara you can easily handle it by assigning the webdriver to new pop-up window. Then you can perform your test case as same way what you have done and when you are done with the pop-up, close the pop-up and then switch back the webdriver to the main window.      main = page.driver.browser.window_handles.first     popup = page.driver.browser.window_handles.last     page.driver.browser.switch_to.window(popup) Since iframe is a part of another source which is used to display another webpage in a webpage, you must handle it exactly same  as pop-up windows.       page.driver. browser.switch_to.frame(iframe_name) However, for iframe you must

Test automation scripts should be simple. This doesn't mean that software product code should be complex. Actually,when everything is simple then the life will be simpler. However sometimes we need to explain something in a complex way. Most of the time, simple is difficult. There may be different reasons behind the complexity but it is clear that if we knew it clearly, we would explain it simply. Let's look at what Albert Einstein says:  "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." As the subject is how simplicity can be applied to test automation, I will focus on simple but efficient test scripts. To enable to write simple test scripts, we must clarify undefined, non-clear, dependent factors on every case/stories. This kind of approach is called as determinism in philosophy. According to the Princeton University dictionary, determinism means as:  " determinism ((philosophy) a philosophical theory holding that al

Using Examples in Cucumber is a great thing for testing world! Examples is a keyword and you can define a set of variable to repeat your case with the whole set of data in the examples block.  We can re-write the examples which checks the login page of amazon.com with Examples feature of Cucumber. Check the following code: In the  amazon_login.feature file we are reading <username> , <password> and <message> variables from the Examples. This means that the scenario which has the steps used these variables will run 2 times, which is the number of row in the examples. There should some changing in the Capybara, Ruby file.  "(.*?)" this means the function takes a string parameter but we are sending table variable so we need to change  (.*) for string variable in table and  (\d+) for integer variable in table.     As you can see from the result there are  3 scenarios ( 3 passed) and 9 steps ( 9 passed) . This means that " Scen

For a company which uses agile development methodology, test automation is very critical. However meaning of test automation in agile is little bit different from the automation activities in waterfall or V-model development methodology. In agile a user story should be automated before the feature is developed and when it is ready then automated test cases can be run to test user stories. For agile test automation, using only selenium is not enough or is not the best approach because of the written test cases. There should be another tool used for writing test cases which automation script can understand and perform what test cases/user stories explain. Cucumber is the tool what I want to explain. With Cucumber we can write test cases and with language called Gherkin which is very easy and understandable for everyone. So we just need to learn the keywords like " Given, When, Then, Examples, Scenario, Scenario Outline , ..." they are not too many, for more information a