The Seapine View

After recording a QA Wizard Pro script, the purpose of my recorded actions is still fresh in my mind. So I quickly add comments above code before I forget what I’ve done. When I have to revisit my scripts months later, those comments really come in handy.

But what happens after I record a long script? I usually get lazy and don’t add as many comments after recording. There are so many steps and actions that I forget what half of them do. Alternatively, I change my behavior to only record small scripts, making my recording efforts less efficient–but hey, at least I can remember everything I did and comment appropriately.

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Web pages often include HTML elements that are not visible to the user. The web browser doesn’t render the elements on the screen, but it often includes their data in the GET and POST requests to the web server. The classic example is an INPUT element of type “hidden” used to embed name/value pairs. But any HTML element might have important attributes that you need to verify.

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Thomism, the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, holds that all intellectual knowledge comes through the senses. (ST I.84.6) This opinion is in direct contradiction with Cartesianism, the philosophy of René Descartes, which doubts the validity of sensate-derived intellectual knowledge. The scientific method implicitly agrees with Aquinas because it too begins with using our senses in the form of observations. Scientists should derive hypotheses from observations, not metaphysical ideas existing purely in the mind.

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Test-driven development (TDD) methodologies advocate writing unit tests before making your code functional. If you practice TDD, wouldn’t it be great if you could easily create user interface tests in addition to your unit tests?
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I built a domain-specific language (DSL) in my text editor so that I don’t have to remember all of the details involved in WordPress blogging. To write this article I type :save-as-blog-draft in vim, my text editor. I don’t have to mess with the details of logging into WordPress, picking a post to edit, and then manually pressing the Save Draft button. Setup took about an hour and by now I’ve blissfully forgotten the manual labor involved in blogging.
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I used to classify drag-and-drop as a “lipstick” feature–one that looked great during product demos but one that nobody actually used. So when I found out we were going to enhance QA Wizard Pro’s drag-and-drop capabilities for the 2010.0 release, I was skeptical. Fortunately, I was wrong.
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Internally, web browsers convert HTML into a tree and process this tree. The W3C calls this tree the Document Object Model (DOM). Web developers have a variety of ways to select data from this DOM tree. For example, they can use CSS Selectors or JavaScript functions like getElementById. They can also use XPath, a language designed for selecting nodes in XML documents.

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To automate the testing of a web application, QA Wizard Pro can either click on an HTML link or navigate to a web page. These actions may appear to be identical, but they have important, subtle differences.
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