The Seapine View

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?
Continue reading…

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.
Continue reading…

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.
Continue reading…

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.

Continue reading…

I am often asked a simple question that is anything but simple. “Which is better – manual testing or automated testing?” It’s impossible to answer without knowing what’s being tested. Everyone seems to want an easy answer so they can go to their boss and say, “If we only use ‘insert your favorite testing preference here’ testing then all will be well with our testing”. If it was that easy, there would only be one version of software, tested once and always working thereafter, with no revisions. Yeah right! Continue reading…

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.
Continue reading…

We’re very excited to release QA Wizard Pro 2010.1 to beta today! The beta is open to anyone, so feel free to click through and try it out. If you do try it out, please leave feedback so that we can continue to improve our product offerings.
Continue reading…

When developing a web application, several versions of the application may exist on different servers for testing purposes before the application is published to the live site. A developer may use a web server on their own machine to test a site while they are developing it. Alpha or beta versions of the web application may be put on a staging server so the QA group can test it. Finally, the application will be published to a live site. In QA Wizard Pro, it’s easy to use a single script to run an automated test against the web application in each configuration.

Continue reading…

A good test case describes the steps to be taken to perform a particular test. Most of these steps will involve the application under test, but there are also typically some set-up tasks to do prior to running the test, and clean-up tasks once the test is complete. These tasks may include copying over a fresh set of test data, clearing the browser cache, or killing off any hanging application processes. When you automate a test case you are focused on capturing your interactions with the application and verifying the application’s response, so the set-up and clean-up tasks usually get done manually. By thinking outside of the (application) window you can easily add many of these tasks to a script, saving you even more time.

Continue reading…

There are many tests required in order to release a piece of software. Among the lists of tests that must be run, many of the tests are repeated for each release of the software and possibly repeated even more frequently. Each of those tests has a cost associated with it. Either it costs you time to run the test, or it costs you quality to skip it.

Continue reading…