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Are These 5 Gaps Missing From Your UI Test Automation Strategy?

April 1, 2019 By Alex McPeak Leave a Comment

As more and more organizations integrate test automation into their workflows, teams have benefitted from shortened feedback loops and less time between development and delivery.

However, while automation has been an asset for effective and efficient testing, many of us are still getting acquainted with the skills required to build out tests that give us maximum value for our time.

What many don’t realize is that there could be gaps in your test automation strategy. These common oversights could be the difference between valuable automation suites and inadequate test results.

Recently, SmartBear hosted a webinar to address a few of these gaps and their solutions. Here are the top insights.

Spending too much time maintaining test scripts – If you’re putting too much time, effort, and energy into creating test scripts, it may be time to reconsider your approach. Often this can be caused by improper planning or poor structuring of testing frameworks. However, by making tests more reusable, maintenance time can be reduced significantly. Rather than making large tests in an attempt to cover as much of your application as possible, break them up into smaller tests cases. You can then use these tests to build out larger, more comprehensive test cases. This way if the UI or the user flow changes, it’ll be easier to go back and use your components.
Zero or little mobile browser testing – In 2018, half of website traffic came from mobile devices, yet companies still tend to neglect testing on mobile. Just having a mobile version of your web application is not enough, you need to verify that it also works correctly on different devices. Without testing on real devices and tablets, you have no idea what your users are experiencing every time they visit your website on a smaller screen. This is not something you want to leave up to chance as mobile web usage continues to increase.
Lack of environment options – Even the best intentions to increase test coverage through automation can fall short without a substantial number of environment options to test on. Different environments can render code in different ways, which means it’s crucial to look at your website on different browsers and devices. Having limited environment options can lead to issues going unnoticed. If you’re only testing one or two browsers and devices, you’re not going to know where there are issues in the others your customers are using. You don’t want preventable bugs slipping through to customers when the fix is as easy as increasing the number of environments you test on.
Spending too much time and money maintaining devices – Some may assume that the best answer to a lack of environment options is to build a device lab. In theory, this seems like a good idea — you’re team has 24/7, onsite access to all the machines and configurations they could possibly need. However, the reality is that these devices are expensive to buy and maintain. Tens of new mobile devices are released every year, meanwhile, existing devices must be repaired and maintained. Not only is the time commitment not practical for most organizations, but it’s also expensive. Most of the time, it’s more trouble than it’s worth to build out a device lab when there are expansive cloud options available.
Lack of parallel testing – Parallel testing is your key to increasing test coverage without compromising time. The issue? This practice is often underutilized by teams. While thinking about the time it takes to test in all these environments might be overwhelming, parallel testing allows you to significantly cut down on the hours it would normally take to run one test after the other. By testing multiple configurations simultaneously, you can condense 30 hours of testing on three different machines down to 10. In this way, parallel testing will reduce the time spent running tests, while still allowing you to hit the environments your users are on.

While automation is no easy task, there are steps we can all take to improve efficiency. Bridging these five gaps in your test automation strategy with the help of tools like TestComplete and CrossBrowserTesting will allow you to get more value out your time.

If you’d like to learn more about these common UI test automation gaps, check out the full webinar below.

Maximum Concurrency with Nightwatch.js

January 9, 2019 By John Reese Leave a Comment

You made it. After weeks writing a dozen Selenium tests with Nightwatch.js, you are done. Your elements have been found, your buttons have been clicked, and your page objects have been modeled. The only thing left is to run your suite of tests across all the browsers you care about. That’s where parallel testing comes in handy. Twelve tests across five platforms mean 60 test cases, but you have a 25-parallel Automation plan, so this shouldn’t take long.

$ nightwatch --env ie,edge,chrome,ff,safari

You press enter and…

Started child process for: ie environment
Started child process for: edge environment
Started child process for: chrome environment
Started child process for: ff environment
Started child process for: safari environment

Huh, that’s funny. It looks like it’s only running five tests at a time, not 20.

Yup, CBT shows that there are only five tests running. What gives?

It turns out that if you use the --env flag to specify the browsers to run on, then Nightwatch will run each environment in parallel, but each test case will execute sequentially.

That’s not what we want! What’s the point of having a big beefy Automation plan if you can’t use it?

So the question becomes, how do we run with MAXIMUM CONCURRENCY?

Well, I couldn’t figure out how to do it in Nightwatch, but I hacked together a workaround!

The following Node.js code will take the --env (or -e) flag and launch an instance of Nightwatch for each specified environment. If no environment is specified, then it will use all environments specified in your Nightwatch configuration file.

parallel-nw.js:

const cbt = require('cbt_tunnels');
const nwConfig = require('./nightwatch')

const spawn = require('child_process').spawn;

const tunnelOptions = {
  'username': nwConfig.test_settings.default.username,
  'authkey': nwConfig.test_settings.default.access_key
}

async function startTunnel(tunnelOptions){
  return new Promise( (resolve, reject) => {
    cbt.start(tunnelOptions, function(err, data) {
      if (err) {
        reject(err)
      } else {
        resolve(data)
      }
    });
  })
}

function envNames(config){
  if(config && config.test_settings){
    return Object.keys(config.test_settings);
  }
  else {
    return [];
  }
}

async function spawnNW(envName){
  return new Promise( (resolve, reject) => {
    let err;
    let proc = spawn('nightwatch', ['-e', envName], {shell:true});
    proc.stdout.on('data', data => {
      if (data.toString('utf8').replace(/\s/g, '') !== ""){
        console.log(`${envName}:\n ${data.toString('utf8')}`)
      }
    })
    proc.stderr.on('data', data => {
      if (data.toString('utf8').replace(/\s/g, '') !== ""){
        console.error(data.toString('utf8'))
      }
    })
    proc.on('close', (code) => {
      if(code === 0){
        console.log(`${envName}: Finished!`)
        resolve(code)
      }
      else {
        reject(new Error(`${envName}: failed ` + err));
      }
    })
  })
}



( async () => {

  // make sure tunnel is started before starting selenium tests
  await startTunnel(tunnelOptions);


  // look for environment names in command line args...
  let names;
  for (let i=0; i < process.argv.length; i++){
    if (process.argv[i] === '--env' || process.argv[i] === '-e'){
      names = process.argv[i+1].split(',');
    }
  }

  // or pull from the config file
  if (names === undefined){
    names = envNames(nwConfig);
  }

  // spawn nightwatch for each environment
  let procs = names.map(spawnNW)

  console.log(`Starting to run Nightwatch on ${names.join(', ')}`)

  // wait for all nightwatch processes to return
  Promise.all(procs)
    .then( () => {
        console.log('Nightwatch finished!')
        // stop tunnel when all tests are done
        cbt.stop()
    })
    .catch( (err) => {console.log(err)})
})()

Once that file is in place, we can use it to run our tests!

node parallel-nw.js --env ie,edge,chrome,ff,safari

Much better!

Nightwatch.js is an End-to-End testing platform for writing and running Selenium tests with Node.js.

SmartBear Named a Leader in Gartner Magic Quadrant for Software Test Automation

January 8, 2019 By Alex McPeak Leave a Comment

SmartBear was named a Leader in the 2018 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Software Test Automation. Gartner, the world’s leading information technology research and advisory company, has recognized SmartBear for the fourth consecutive year, with this being the first as a Leader.

Amidst emerging trends in DevOps and Agile Development, SmartBear has solidified its commitment to accelerate delivery by enabling continuous testing, making it a key player in this space.

SmartBear has encouraged teams to adopt intelligent automation practices across the entire software delivery lifecycle, providing a portfolio of tools to easily design, test, and monitor at both the API and UI layer such as TestComplete, TestLeft, Hiptest, ReadyAPI, and CrossBrowserTesting.

CrossBrowserTesting is proud to be part of SmartBear since being acquired in 2016. The CrossBrowserTesting provides the ability to run Selenium- and Appium-based tests across over 1500 real desktop and mobile devices in the cloud. Additionally, capabilities for record and replay, remote interactive testing and debugging, and visual testing in CrossBrowserTesting make it an asset to teams are practicing both manual and automated testing.

The strong support for open source communities like Selenium in CrossBrowserTesting as well as the OpenAPI Initiative, Swagger, and SoapUI has further propelled the success of SmartBear. By contributing to these initiatives, SmartBear has a crucial hand in the open source tools that are used by thousands of software teams every day.

Additionally, new offerings over the last year have broadened the portfolio and enabled SmartBear to lead the test automation market. With the acquisitions of Zephyr for test management and Hiptest for continuous testing with native BDD support, as well as the development of LoadNinja, SmartBear is innovating at an unparalleled speed.

“We’re proud to be recognized by Gartner as a Leader in the Magic Quadrant,” said Christian Wright, Chief Product Officer and Executive GM at SmartBear. “We believe our Leader position reaffirms our vision of enabling quality throughout the software development lifecycle through a comprehensive test automation portfolio. We see Gartner’s recognition reflects the excellent feedback we receive from our vast customer base and our teams’ ability to deliver open, collaborative, and easy-to-use tools to our users.”

To access a complimentary copy of the 2018 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Software Test Automation, visit https://smartbear.com/resources/white-papers/gartner-magic-quadrant-2018/.

Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Software Test Automation, Joachim Herschmann, Thomas Murphy, Jim Scheibmeir, 27 November 2018

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from [insert client name or reprint URL].

3 Methods for Hands-free Continuous Testing

December 4, 2018 By Alex McPeak Leave a Comment

In order to strike the perfect balance between speed and quality, teams that hope to achieve Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery must also implement Continuous Testing.

This is often easier said than done. It’s virtually impossible to have your team running tests at every moment — they do have lives outside of work after all, and it can be difficult to put dinner on the table while running a Selenium script at the same time. So how do you run your scripts, even if you aren’t at your desk?

Fortunately, there are various hands-free options for continuous testing that you can implement, which will keep tests running for you while you eat, sleep, or maybe even get some exploratory testing done.

Why Continuous Testing

What’s the point of continuous testing? There are a few major advantages that will enable you to achieve more in your day-to-day.

Test while you sleep – With continuous testing, you can literally test in your sleep. By setting tests to run overnight, you can experience the luxury of coming in the next morning to have your test results waiting for you and knowing with a glance whether they passed. Just ask America’s Test Kitchen about how convenient it is.
Keep up with Agile, DevOps and CI/CD – When software development teams are constantly integrating, you need a testing strategy to ensure those new features, fixes, and changes are put through the quality process, no matter how frequently they’re implemented. Continuous Testing is the only way QA teams can keep up with constantly changing features, frequent integrations, and fast workflows.
Catch bugs in each regression – When there are constantly small changes to an application’s code, it can break something that was previously functioning. And you don’t want your customers to be the one to catch it. Continuous Testing will help you be first to spot new bugs, so you can quickly debug and release to users with confidence.
Level up your automation game – Automate your automation with continuous testing, and set your tests to run as often as you need. Then come back to test results or screenshots that tell you exactly what you need to know about the health of your applications. Plus, testing in parallel allows you to further accelerate Continous Testing to increase browser coverage without compromising runtime.

Continuous Testing With a CI Server

Selenium WebDriver has long provided teams with the ability to automate tests across browsers. But in order to run those tests continuously, a Continuous Integration tool such as Jenkins, VS Team Services, Buildbot, Bamboo, CircleCI, TravisCI, Codeship, or TeamCity is needed.

By far, the most popular option is Jenkins, an open source automation server written in Java. In fact, according to the SmartBear 2018 State of Testing Survey, 66 percent of participants choose Jenkins to be their CI server. For development teams adopting Agile and DevOps workflows, Jenkins is a reliable tool for continuous integration and delivery.

But what about testing teams that want to leverage Jenkins for Continuous Testing with Selenium? The CrossBrowserTesting integration with Jenkins lets you run automated functional tests with Selenium, Appium, and visual screenshot tests, which means that every time you run your build process, you can simultaneously run your testing suite across thousands of browsers.

This is ideal for teams that already work with Selenium and a CI tool for deployment to start testing on a continuous basis. While Jenkins tends to be the most popular choice for CI and automated test scheduling, CrossBrowserTesting also integrates with TeamCity and VS Team Services, so no matter what tools you’re already using, it’s easy to integrate CrossBrowserTesting into your current workflow.

Continuous Testing With a Record and Playback Tool

For teams that may be less familiar with Selenium but still wish to automate, a record and playback tool might be a more practical option.

Record & Replay enables teams to achieve automation across browsers, just like they would with Selenium, without requiring knowledge of scripting and frameworks. This has provided teams with a more accessible option for less technical team members, or those who are just getting started with automation, to create automated tests. As tools like Selenium IDE and its alternatives are brought back into the spotlight, these options are becoming more and more attractive to modern testing teams.

But where record and playback tools will normally only run the test once to check if the test passes, how can testers implement Continuous Testing?

With new Scheduling in CrossBrowserTesting, you can schedule a Record & Replay suite to run as often as you need them. For organizations that have less technical testers, this allows you to achieve continuous testing without requiring the skills to run Selenium and Jenkins or another automation server.

Continuous Screenshot Testing

Teams that solely focus on functional testing without incorporating visual testing will be disappointed when all their tests pass and users are still pointing out visual bugs.

When visual elements can change from browser to browser or device to device and make the user’s experience difficult or impossible while still functioning correctly, it’s important to run compare screenshots in regression. Comparing these pages side by side and with their historical versions means you can be more aware of changes that break the application in order to debug before they reach the end user.

While you could always run automated screenshots in CrossBrowserTesting, it required a manual motion to rerun those tests on a certain cadence. You can now set those screenshot tests to run with the new Scheduling feature, just like you can with Record & Replay.

Continuous Testing for Every Team

No matter what tools you’re already using, what technical level you’re at, or how far your team is in their test automation journey, there are options to help every team achieve continuous testing in CrossBrowserTesting.

With options to schedule tests with Selenium, Record & Replay, and automated screenshots, you can take your automation to the next level and receive test results through email or Slack on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis that you decide.

Introducing Scheduling for Record & Replay and Automated Screenshots

November 13, 2018 By Alex McPeak Leave a Comment

This year, we introduced Record & Replay for teams that want to automate tests without scripting. This method of codeless automation has allowed teams to maximize the value of every manual test by reducing execution time while increasing speed and coverage. And just like with Selenium testing, once your tests are recorded in Record and Replay, you can run them in parallel to get even more out of each suite.

Additionally, when paired with automated screenshots, teams of any skill level have the ability to visually and functionally verify their web application on thousands of browsers at once. By leveraging our Comparison Engine, you can take visual testing to the next level by evaluating differences that are highlighted at the pixel level.

Now with Scheduling for Record & Replay and automated screenshots, you can set tests to run on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis and have the results sent to you via email or Slack. Scheduling is the next step in helping our customers achieve continuous testing without needing to learn highly technical CI tools like Jenkins, TeamCity, and VS Team Services.

If you’re thinking this sounds too good to be true, find out how easy it is to get started with Scheduling in CrossBrowserTesting and see for yourself.

How to Get Started With Automated Test Scheduling

For Record and Replay:

Go to Replay a Suite under Record & Replay in the CrossBrowserTesting app
Select one of your suites. Note: You need a previously saved suite in order to schedule a Record & Replay test. Follow these directions to find out how to create a Record & Replay suite.
Scroll down to “Suite Schedules” and click “Add Schedule”
Decide if you want to run the suite on a daily, weekly, or monthly schedule and set a time for it to run. Choose if you want notifications via email or Slack and select “Add Schedule”

For Automated Screenshots:

Go to View Test Results under Screenshots in the CrossBrowserTesting
Select which screenshot test you’d to schedule and click “Test Results”. Note: You need to have previously run a screenshot test in order to schedule one. Follow these directions for how to take an automated screenshot of your website.
Click “Add Schedule” and set to run daily, weekly, or monthly at a time of your choosing. Select whether you want notifications through email or Slack and click “Add Schedule”

That’s it — just a few steps to functionally and visually testing your UI on a continuous basis with no code.

If you want to learn more about Scheduling for Record & Replay and automated screenshots, join us in our upcoming webinar to learn just how easy it is to start scheduling your tests today. We’ll run through the new feature and give example use cases of Scheduling that you can immediately start implementing in your workflow.

We’ll also go through CI with Jenkins to further our pursuit of continuous testing in CrossBrowserTetsing for teams that may be interested in Selenium automation.

Next Steps for Teams Who Want to Move to Agile Project Management

November 7, 2018 By Alex McPeak Leave a Comment

It seems that the companies we all aspire to be more like are moving quicker and releasing faster than ever before. So, how can the rest of us strive to follow in the footsteps of software giants that release innovative software on the hour? While there may be no single, clearly-defined answer, we do know that many are seeing success with agile project management and development methods.

By focusing on feedback from stakeholders throughout the development process, not only is agile found to be a faster development method, it’s also more effective in the way that it allows and encourages changing requirements.

However, as waterfall is the traditional methodology for software development, teams that are stuck in their old ways might find the transition to agile hard to wrap their head around, so here are 7 tips for teams who want to take the next steps and move to agile project management.

Identify what or who is missing to make agile work. In order to move to agile, you first have to recognize that it will be process your entire team will have to get on board with and fully embrace in order to make it work. Identify the roles and people you need on your team to make a successful transition. It might be helpful to onboard a project manager, scrum master, or agile coach to help adjust the current workflow. Look at your current team, as well, to understand where there are silos and barriers to communication. Teams that don’t communicate will find it hard to be successful. Agile project management works best when this is cross-departmental collaboration, so it’s important to work from the inside out.
Prepare to shift left. Agile will require more testing earlier in the software development lifecycle. Because each phase of the SDLC is done in short iterations, rather than long incremental ones like with waterfall, testing shouldn’t wait until the end when new features are fully developed. With a focus on continuous integration and continuous delivery that comes with agile development, continuous testing will be the key to fast feedback and iterative changes that are needed to release high-quality software. Evaluate whether you will need to introduce test automation, additional QA team members, new tools, or something else to help you reach maximum test coverage.
Poke holes in what you’re doing now. Look at your current planning process, and outline how your strategy will have to change in agile development to allow for more feedback and flexibility. Where are the bottlenecks in your current process, and what prevents your team from delivering high-quality software or meeting short deadlines? This will be crucial to shifting to a new way of thinking and transforming your team’s workflow. Familiarize yourself with the different agile methodologies such as Scrum, Kanban, and Extreme Programming. While these all follow agile principles, they achieve it in different ways. Based on the makeup of your team and the objectives you discussed, it will affect the way you carry out agile project management.
Get on board with sprints and standup. No matter which methodology you choose, a few things will probably be the same, and they’ll help you properly implement agile project management in your organization if you take the time to do them correctly. Sprints will be the duration of you planning — usually they’re two weeks long but can be anywhere from one to four — and standups are where you talk about what you’ll be doing in each sprint. Take advantage of these opportunities for strategic planning and collaboration with the entire team.
Backlog issues and tasks. Identify the projects that currently challenge your team and what you’d like prioritize when you transition to agile. Create a backlog of tasks, gaps, objectives that need to be addressed so you can start ranking them on most to least important and having conversations about future goals. Discuss what is needed from each team member, how it will be accomplished, and what information is currently needed to make it as “done”. Once you begin to organize your team and the work that needs to be done, you can start building out detailed tasks and sprints.
Don’t skip your retrospective. As you adjust to agile and the many changes that come along, you’ll be constantly learning about what’s working well and what isn’t, as well as what individuals are successful with and what they’re struggling with. Ensure that everyone has an equal say in each sprint, so it’s not just leaders and managers giving their two centrs. Focus on how you can improve in each sprint. However, don’t just wait until retrospectives to collect feedback from your team — encourage communication and checkins throguhout the sprint.
Be open to change. Requirements change, tasks get de-prioritized, clients and customers change their mind, and feedback will alter the sprint process. The nice thing about agile project management is that it encourages these adjustments. Embrace agile and understand that these frequent changes are improvements that will help your team achieve continuous integration, testing, and delivery. If you feel like you’re getting lost or confused, always resort back to the agile manifesto to realign your team with the principles behind agile.

Finding your groove with agile won’t happen overnight, but there are certain steps your team can take to make the transition more seamless. For more, take a hint from what agile teams can learn from Netflix.

Upcoming Webinar: Achieving Quality Without a Dedicated Test Team

October 31, 2018 By Alex McPeak Leave a Comment

As teams shift left, adopt new methodologies, and take on new testing strategies, the role of software developer v.s. testers is becoming more blurred. In fact, many modern software teams no longer work according to these rigid roles.

Meghan Munseeney is a Software Engineer at Yesware who also has a hand in Quality Assurance. This means she’s involved throughout the software development lifecycle from code changes to production, operations, and customer escalation.

In fact, this is a commonality among the software engineers at YesWare, since the organization has no dedicated QA team. However, Yesware is constantly able to release great software to customers thanks to star talent like Meghan.

Join CrossBrowserTesting and Meghan Munseeney on Tuesday, November 13 at 2 PM ET for “Achieving Quality Without a Dedicated Test Team” to find out how software companies like Yesware are adapting to modern testing practices by arming every role with the skills they need to be successful in an ever-changing environment.

In this webinar you will learn:

What the Yesware quality process looks like
How Yesware handles testing without a dedicated QA team
How Software Engineers and Developers can play a larger part in quality
Q&A with Meghan

The Spectrum of Testing Practice: Why Are Some Companies Stuck in the 90’s?

October 24, 2018 By Lisa Crispin Leave a Comment

Those of us who are passionate about delivering valuable, high-quality software to our customers frequently and at a sustainable pace are living in exciting times.

Many are embracing “modern testing” principles. We’re acquiring new skills such as how to help non-testing teammates learn to test, how to analyze production use data, and how to use that data for testing. Testing is at the heart of DevOps culture, providing new opportunities for testers. We have amazing tools to help us with activities such as regression test automation and learning from production monitoring, logging, and observing.

At the same time, I still encounter many companies who are doing testing the way most people approached it 20 or more years ago. They have siloed testing/QA teams who don’t collaborate with development teams, operation teams, or even product and design teams. They have no automated regression tests or are struggling mightily to get traction on that automation. They’re doing only manual regression testing, working from written scripts, and no exploratory testing.

Why??!!!

I’ve seen leading agile practitioners scratch their heads and wonder – after two decades of sharing agile values, principles, and practices with the world, why are so many people not using them?

Teams that do use a whole team approach to testing and quality are successful at improving their processes and their product. The State of DevOps report shows correlations between the use of modern testing approaches and high team performance. So why isn’t everyone trying to use what we’ve seen work well for 20 years now?

I have no actual evidence as to why this is, but I have some unscientific theories which I’d like to share. I’d love to hear your theories too.

Lots of Newbies

The number of new software professionals is growing fast. The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicted a 24% increase in software developers alone from 2016 to 2026. Despite having heard “testing is dead” for the past 15 or so years, I see more and more testing conferences with more and more people attending them, so I surmise our profession is also growing fast.

Universities are still generally poor at teaching modern development and testing approaches, so people come out of school without expertise in agile or DevOps values, principles, and practices. They certainly don’t learn much about testing in university. So, they have to somehow discover all this once they’re on the job. If they join a company whose software process is still stuck in the 90’s, doing poor waterfall at best, they’re unlikely to be exposed to modern testing.

Culture is Hard to Change

In my experience, it’s extremely difficult to change an established company culture, especially in a large organization. Even big enterprise companies who “go agile” often transition from role-based silos to having dozens of siloed Scrum teams that don’t talk to each other. All too often, an IT organization transitions to “agile” and either leaves the testers on their own test/QA team or sticks them in a cross-functional delivery team with no training or support to figure out how they should now work with people in other roles.

Large companies often have a complicated power structure. Upper managers may be more interested in protecting their domain than in delivering better software to their customers more frequently – and they don’t always prioritize a sustainable pace. If nobody educates them on how an investment in software quality – doing things like giving teams time to experiment and learn — pays off in the long run, they just keep imposing unrealistic deadlines while their software teams burn out.

Change is hard. Even when management is receptive, maybe not all team members are willing to try something new. It often takes only one naysayer to kill an effort to move away from “the way we’ve always done it”. Companies that are strapped for money may not be able to see how an investment in learning pays off.

I once worked in a company with a “hero culture” where the person who fixed the problem that brought down the website was lauded and rewarded – so why try to prevent production problems from happening? Even after leading a successful agile project to meet an “impossible” deadline, I couldn’t affect change in that culture.

Life is Challenging

If your management doesn’t support you learning how to improve the way you deliver your software, you have to do it on your own time. As you learn, you can be a change agent and try to help your team improve.

But that takes time, and we all have many demands on our time. Some people have to work two or more jobs to support their family. Some people must spend much of each day caring for a family member. Others have health issues that limit their activities. Perhaps they can’t afford to go to conferences. Perhaps they can’t take an evening off to go to a meetup or watch online video courses. There are so many reasons people aren’t able to learn on their own time.

So, how do we promote adoption of modern software delivery principles and practices?

I don’t have any easy answers, but I’d like to start more conversations about this. I think we can raise awareness that there are better ways to work, that it’s possible to make our customers happier while enjoying our work a lot more. Here are some ideas:

If you can, make time to educate yourself with the many resources available to us these days: online courses, webinars, blogs, books, articles, podcasts, local meetups, conferences.
Share what you learn with your teammates. Help them learn about different types of testing. Try small experiments together to improve.
When you meet other software professionals, for example in a social situation, encourage them to join you at your local tech meetup
Write about your own experiences, share them at meetups and conferences, to show others that improvements are doable and effective (if public speaking scares the pants off you, check out the SpeakEasy mentoring program)
Contribute to scholarship programs that help people attend conferences and access online content such as webinars and videos of conference talks

We have new people joining our profession all the time. What ideas do you have to help them embrace 2018 rather than 1988?

About Lisa Crispin: Lisa is a tester who enjoys sharing her experiences and learning from others. She works as a Testing Advocate at mabl, is a co-author of Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams as well More Agile Testing: Learning Journeys for the Whole Team, she’s a frequent conference attendee and organizer, and she is an avid donkey lover. To find out more, find her on Twitter or LinkedIn.

The Faces Behind Selenium

October 18, 2018 By Alex McPeak Leave a Comment

The CrossBrowserTesting team is getting excited for SeleniumConf. But as we settle in to Chicago, we wanted to take a look back at Selenium’s rich history to highlight some of the faces behind Selenium and meet some of the contributors who’ve made the popular open source automation tool what it is today.

So put a face to the name (or should we say a name to the tool?), and enjoy SeleniumConf Chicago knowing that you are properly brushed up on your Selenium knowledge.

Note that there are plenty more people who have committed to Selenium, so check out the list of contributors on the site. And if you’re feeling inspired, find out how you can get involved with Selenium yourself.

Simon Stewart – Simon Stewart, a.k.a the creator of Selenium Webdriver, is well known by the Selenium community — and for good reason. He’s also a lead Selenium developer, specifically on Selenium 2, and a frequent speaker at conferences, which means you won’t want to miss his “Selenium: State of the Union” keynote at SeleniumConf. He currently works as a Software Engineer at Deliveroo and has roots at Google, Facebook, and Thoughtworks. Additionally, as Selenium goes through the W3C specification process, Simon is co-editor.

Jason Huggins – Selenium IDE was originally developed by Jason Huggins when he worked at ThoughtWorks in Chicago in 2004 — making the location of this year’s Selenium Conference fitting. Huggins worked heavily on developing Selenium RC, Selenium Ice (the IE browser extension), and Selenium Core. He was also responsible for naming Selenium, jokingly dubbed as a cure to a competitor called Mercury.

Paul Hammant – Paul Hammant joined Thoughtworks and helped move the project towards creating Selenium Remote Control (Selenium RC). While Selenium RC is no longer supported today, Hammant played a critical part in Selenium’s evolution.

Phillipe Hanrigou – In 2008, Phillipe Hanrigou created Selenium Grid and was a committer of Selenium RC. Selenium Grid is a server that allows you to run tests on remote machines at the same time through a hub and multiple nodes in order to speed up testing. This method is known as parallel testing, and today it can be achieved through this Selenium Grid or with a cloud testing tool such as CrossBrowserTesting.

Jim Evans – Jim Evans is no newbie to the software industry. In fact, he’s been part of it for 25 years, working at some major companies including Microsoft, Inuit, and Salesforce, where he works today. Evans is on the Project Steering Committee, and most notably built the IE driver and the .net language bindings. As a contributor to Selenium since 2010, this just skims the surface of all the work he’s done for the project, as well as many other open source projects. But fair warning, #neverflywithjimevans or you may not make it to SeleniumConf on time.

Aslak Hellesoy – Aslak Hellesoy is one of the first contributors to Selenium, but his list of achievements doesn’t stop there. He’s also the creator of Cucumber and co-founder of Cucumber Ltd. Don’t miss his SeleneiumConf talk on “Sub-second Acceptance Tests” where he’ll discuss techniques for making functional acceptance tests run in a fraction of the time.

Ashley Hunsberger – Ashley Hunsberger is a member of the Selenium Steering committee, but you may know her better as co-chair of SeleniumConf, which means she helped put together the killer lineup you’ll be experiencing. If you see her this week, make sure to commend her on her hard work bringing together a great community of Selenium contributors, users, and enthusiasts alike.

Last Minute Web Testing Checklist for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the Holiday Season

October 12, 2018 By Alex McPeak Leave a Comment

It may seem like the Holiday season is a ways away, but time flies (doesn’t it feel like the year just started?). Your QA team has probably been preparing their web applications for the traffic of Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the rest of the holiday season for some time now.

But if you’re scrambling to get everything done in time, are not totally sure everything that should be done, or just wanted to make sure you’re checking all the right boxes, we’ve put together a last-minute web testing checklist to ensure your site runs flawlessly. And to make sure you avoid the same fates of other companies’ bugs and crashes.

Prepare your site so you don’t lose customers when it matters most. With the help of SmartBear tools like CrossBrowserTesting, Alertsite, and LoadUI, you can be confident in your website 365 days a year.

Test Planning

Run a risk analysis of your application to understand which pages receive the most traffic, as well as which are business critical
Put a plan in place for in case your site experiences higher traffic than expected. Come up with a strategy for getting the website back up
Consider creating a special error page so that customers are aware of the issue in case of downtime
Use Google Analytics or Mixpanel to check which are the most popular browsers configurations your current audience is using.
Check a site like Statcounter to evaluate which browsers, operating systems, and devices are the most popular overall

Functional Testing and Usability

Check essential business functions such as login, product pages, add to cart, search and filtering capabilities, and navigation
Test form fields and dropdowns and make sure the application responds correctly if something is not filled out. This may differ based on whether the field is optional or mandatory
Test that product prices are correct and shipping charges are accurate. If these changes based on location, account for it in testing
Make sure payment transactions are fully functional and can accept deals and promotions. Check algorithms, transaction, calculations; and ensure that it checkout works for all available forms of payment
Perform negative testing to discover which user actions are most likely to break the application
Test links to make sure none are broken
Manually test a full workflow to analyze the usability and functionality of a complete buyer journey
Use personas during exploratory testing to perform tests that account for different user journeys
Functionally validate through Live Testing, Record & Replay, and/or Selenium Testing

Security Testing

Perform penetration testing to check your application for weak spots that could compromise customer data
Integrate security testing into your automation with open source tools like ZAP
Ensure the encryption of passwords, payment information, and other sensitive data
Implement multifactor authentication for increased security of your users

Browser & Mobile Testing

Identify the most common and problematic browsers and operating systems for testing
Test to make sure media such as sound, videos, and images are working correctly. If you have a dynamic web page, make sure it looks as intended on different browsers
Identify which mobile devices you need to test on and assess responsive design
Mobile devices suffer from more environmental factors than a typical desktop application. Determine how your site works on a device with a poor network connectivity or low battery
Use real devices to get a feeling for the usability of your application on mobile

Visual Testing

Visually validate your website with screenshot comparisons to evaluate at a pixel-level
Take screenshots locally or behind a firewall using Local Tunnel to test visual elements before pages go to live to the public
Go through your application Live Testing to evaluate visual efficiency over multi-step scenarios
Make sure elements like buttons, images, and text are consistent across browsers
Conduct visual regression testing to ensure the layout remains stable over new iterations

Test Automation

Use test automation for regression testing to make sure functionalities remain stable through code changes
Automate small, repetitive, and business-critical test cases at the UI level
Analyze test results to identify where you have the most pertinent bottlenecks and commonly run into failures
Automate your tests against real desktop and mobile browsers with Selenium. Take your scripts to the cloud with CrossBrowserTesting to acesss 1500+ browsers
Leverage parallel testing to run automated tests across more browsers in less time

Load Testing and Monitoring

Get an estimate of how many users you expect will be landing on your site at peak times
Check site speed with performance and get response times for different connection speeds
Use load testing to determine behavior under peak traffic loads
Utilize pre-built load templates or customize your own to see how your website or API handles different traffic volumes
Stress test to get a reading on what the maximum load is before your application is unresponsive or crashes
Set up Uptime Monitoring to ensure you’re alerted immediately if your site crashes
Begin monitoring the month before so you have a benchmark to alert against
Enable testing and monitoring over complete user journeys and flows so customers don’t run into errors after venturing from the home page