QA in Production

For a while, I have been thinking about the responsibilities of QA Engineers by broadening them to the production environment. In this post, I want to write the reasoning behind the needs of QA Engineers in production.

Integration Testing: Tools and Technology

Every day we are facing new integration points with third-party tools or technologies for a win-win strategy. Most of the time these technologies are in the term of the trial period or just a cheap alternative to the present one. These technologies or tools simply don't have adequate documentation so it makes the development and testing of integration riskier. This means that the development, test, uat or preprod test environment is not enough for catching all possible bugs, as a result, the production environment is the final destination for checking logs and monitoring the integration results.

Validation of Non-Functional Requirements

There are also unclear points behind the non-functional requirements like performance and usability. The real performance of the applications can be seen in real user environments. This doesn't mean that performance testing should be done in production. This means that with the performance of the application, the real users behave as expected or they just leave the application just before the message which was integrated with the last build appears. Another meaning of this just needs to check the performance requirement is statistically valid in terms of customer satisfaction. The usability part, even we had done usability testing with the real users before the new feature request in the usability lab, it is no guarantee that the result will be repeated by the real user in their environments. This time we need to check the usability requirement with the real user.

The Nature of the Development Process

The development process can also impose QA Engineers to monitor the production environment. If you adopt CI or CD the process is more like to monitor in production because production should be updated regularly which means you have a more risky situation. Translation from traditional QA to agile adopted QA requires more collaboration with other teams; furthermore, translation from manual deployment to CD requires a better monitoring system for the development process. Checking the monitoring system is a task of QAs because it gives the overall quality of the process, which test results can be as good as the development process. About the subject ThoughtWorks has taken it to radar and name it as a technology with "QA in Production" and to recommend it as "Trial" which means that enterprise should use it for the project which risk can be handed. It give the following explanation:

Traditionally, QA roles have focused on assessing the quality of a software product in a pre-production environment. With the rise of Continuous Delivery, the QA role is shifting to include analyzing software product quality in production. This involves monitoring the production systems, coming up with alert conditions to detect urgent errors, determining ongoing quality issues, and figuring out what measurements you can use in the production environment to make this work. While there is a danger that some organizations will go too far and neglect pre-production QA, our experience shows that QA in production is a valuable tool for organizations that have already progressed to a reasonable degree of Continuous Delivery.

Understandable Monitoring Tools

In the market, there are very successful monitoring tools in which everyone in the organization can understand what going on in the production. Most of them give real-time and plotting graphs for stream data, giving a number of non-responsive requests, network errors, and more. These are some of the well-known tools: Nagios, HappyApps, Kibana, Performance Co-Pilot, Icinga, OpenNMS, Op5.

Selenium Error "Element is not currently interactable and may not be manipulated"

Selenium webdriver can drive different browsers like as Firefox, Chrome or Internet Explorer. These browsers actually cover the majority of internet users, so testing these browsers possibly covers the 90% of the internet users. However, there is no guaranty that the same automation scripts can work without a failure on these three browsers. For this reason, automation code should be error-prone for the browsers you want to cover. The following error is caught when the test script run for Chrome and Internet Explorer, but surprisingly there is no error for the Firefox. Selenium gives an error like below: Traceback (most recent call last): File "D:\workspace\sample_project\sample_run.py", line 10, in <module> m.login() File "D:\workspace\ sample_project \test_case_imps.py", line 335, in login driver.find_element_by_id("id_username").clear() File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\selenium-2.35.0-py2.7.egg\selenium\webdriver\r

Change Default Timeout and Wait Time of Capybara

One of the biggest challenge for automation is handling timeout problem. Most of the time, timeout is 60 seconds but it may sometimes not enough if you have badly designed asynchronous calls or the third party ajax calls. This makes handling timeout more complex. set large enough to tolerate network related problems. For Selenium based automation frameworks, like Capybara, default Webdriver timeout is set to Net::ReadTimeout (Net::ReadTimeout) Changing ReadTimeout If you have timeout problem for Capybara, it gives an error like above. This means that the page is not fully loaded in given timeout period. Even you can see that page is loaded correctly but webdriver wait until the Ajax calls finish. class BufferedIO #:nodoc: internal use only def initialize (io) @io = io @read_timeout = 60 @continue_timeout = nil @debug_output = nil @rbuf = '' end . . . . . def rbuf_fill beg

Create an Alias for Interactive Console Work: Selenium and Capybara

If you are working on shell most of the time Aliases are very helpfull and time saving. For testing purposes you can use Alias for getting ready your test suites. In this post, I want to explain both running Selenium and Capybara on console and creating aliases for each. This post is for Windows machines, if you are using Unix-like see this post . Creating Scripts for Selenium and Capybara First of all, it is assumed that you have installed Selenium and Capybara correctly and they work on your machines. If you haven't installed, you can see my previous posts. I am using the Selenium with Python and the Capybara with Ruby. You can use several different language for Selenium but Capybara works only with Ruby. Create scripts in a directory called scripts (in your home folder, like as ~/scripts ) for your automation tool as following, save them as capybara.rb, sel.py : Creating Aliases Depends on your favourite shell, you need to add the alias to .bashrc bash

Page-Object Pattern for Selenium Test Automation with Python

Page-object model is a pattern that you can apply it to develop efficient automation framework. With the page-model, it is possible to minimize maintenance cost. Basically page-object means that your every page is inherited from a base class which includes basic functionalities for every page. If you have some new functionalities that every page should have, you can simple add it to the base class. Base class is like the following: In this part we are creating pages which are inherited from base page. Every page has its own functionalities written as python functions. Some functions return to a new page, it means that these functions leave the current page and produce a new page. You should write as much as functions you need in the assertion part because this is the only part you can use the webdriver functions to interact with web pages . This part can be evaluate as providing data to assertion part. The last part is related to asserting your test cases against to the

Performance Testing on CI: Locust is running on Jenkins

For a successful Continuous Integration pipeline, there should be jobs for testing the performance of the application. It is necessary if the application is still performing well. Generally performance testing is thought as kinds of activities performed one step before going to live. In general approach it is true but don't forget to test your application's performance as soon as there is an testable software, such as an api end point, functions, and etc. For CI it is a good approach to testing performance after functional testing and just before the deployment of next stage. In this post, I want to share some info about Jenkins and Locust. In my previous post you can find some information about Locust and Jenkins. Jenkins operates the CI environment and Locust is a tool for performance testing. To run the Locust on Jenkins you need command line arguments which control the number of clients , hatch rate, running locust without web interface and there should be so

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