I am writing step definitions for scenario's described in Cucumber.
So If I am testing a scenario of liking a comment on a post.
Should I make sure that there will be a comment and a post in the first place in the steps only?
Or my test should catch such scenario and give a message in the log ?
I am using Cucumber-JVM as of now.
Well typically a good test technique is to test positives. It's a good idea to write your test to the future feature that will come out. In your case, write your selenium test to make sure that you are able to like your comment on a post.
Ideally, when that feature comes out, the test will already be written, and will go from a failing state to a passing state.
Even more ideally, it's a good idea to have a seperate dvl environment from your production, that way you can test on your dvl environment, and then just point your tests to production once that feature is released.
Related
We are switching from a classic 'Waterfall' model into more Agile-orient philosophy. We decided to give BDD a try (Cucumber), but we have some issues with migrating some of our 'old' methodologies. The biggest question mark is how manual tests integrates into the cycle.
Let's say the Project Manager defined the Feature and some basic Scenario Outlines. With the test team, we defined around 40 Scenarios for this feature. Some are not possible to automatically test, which means they will have to be tested manually. Execute manual testing when all you have is the feature file, feels wrong. We want to be able to see past failure rate of tests for example. Most of the Test-Cases managers support such features, but they can't work with Feature files. Maintaining the Manual Testcases in external Test-Case manager, will cause never-ending updating issues between the Feature file and the Test-Case manager.
I'm interested to hear if anyone is able to cover this 'mid-ground' and how.
This is not a very unusual case. Even in Agile it may not be possible to automate every scenario. The scrum teams I am working with usually tag them as #manual scenario in the feature file. We have configured our automation suite (Cucumber - Ruby) to ignore these tags while running nightly jobs. One problem with this is, as you have mentioned, we won't know what was the outcome of manual tests as the testers document the results locally.
My suggestion for this was to document the results of each iteration in a YML or any other file format that suits the purpose. This file should be part of the automation suite and should be checked in the repository. So to start with you have results documented along with the automation suite. Later when you have the resource and time, you can add a functionality to your automation suite to read this file and generate a report either with other automation results or separately. Until then your version control should help you to track all previous results.
Hope this helps.
To add to #Eswar's answer, if you're using Cucumber (or one of it's siblings), one option would be to execute the test runner manually and include prompts for the tester to check certain aspects. They then pass/fail the test according to their judgement.
This is often useful for aesthetic aspects e.g. cross-browser rendering, element alignment, correct images used, etc.
As #Eswar mentioned, you can exclude these tests from your automated runs by tagging them.
See this article for an example.
Test cases that cannot be automated are a poor fit for a cucumber test. We have a bunch of these edge cases. It is nigh impossible to get Selenium to verify PDF documents well. Same thing for CSV downloads (not impossible, but not worth the effort). Look and feel tests simply require human eyes at this point. Accessibility testing with screen readers is best done manually as well.
For that, be sure to record the acceptance criteria in the user story in whichever tool you use to track work items. Write a manual test case. The likes of Azure DevOps, Jira, IBM Rational Team Concert and their ilk have ways to record manual test plans, link them to stories, and record the results of executing a manual test.
I would remove the manual test cases from the cucumber tests, and rely on the acceptance criteria for the story, and link the story to some sort of manual test case, be it in a tool or a spreadsheet.
Sometimes you just need to compromise.
We use Azure DevOps with Test Plans + some custom code to synchronize cucumber tests to ADO. I can describe how we’ve realized it in our projects:
We start with the cucumber file first. Each User Story has its own Feature file. The scenarios in the Feature are the acceptance criteria for the story. We end up with lots of Feature files, so we use naming conventions and folders to organize them.
We annotate the top of the Feature file with a tag to the User Story, eg #Story-1234
We‘ve written a command line utility that reads the cucumber files with these tags. It then fetches all the Test Suites in the Test Plan that are linked to Stories. In ADO, a story can only be linked to a single test suite. If a Test Suite doesn’t exist for that Story, our tool creates one.
For each Scenario, the tool creates a an ADO Test Case and then annotates the Scenario with the Test Case ID. This creates amazing traceability for each User Story as the related Test Cases are automatically linked to the Story in the Azure DevOps UI
Although we don’t do this, we could populate the TestCase with the step definitions from our cucumber Scenario. It’s a basic XML structure that describes the steps to take. This would be useful if we wanted to manually execute the test case using the Azure DevOps Test Case UI. Since we focus primarily on automation, we rely on the steps in our Feature files and our ADO Test Cases end up being symbolic links back to cucumber Scenarios.
Because our cucumber tests are written in C# (SpecFlow), we can get the full class name and method for the cucumber test code. Our tool is able to update the Azure DevOps Test Case with the automation details.
Any test case that isn’t ready for automation or must be done manually, we annotate the Scenario with a #ignore or #manual tag.
Using Azure DevOps Pipelines, we use the Visual Studio Test task to run our tests. The important point here is we execute the Test Plan option. This option fetches the Test Cases in the Test Plan that have automation and then executes the specific cucumber tests. The out-of-the-box functionally updates the Test Case statuses with the test results.
After running through automation, we use the Test Plan Report in Azure DevOps which shows the Test Case execution status over time and can distinguish between test automated and manual test cases.
We execute any remaining manual test cases to complete the Test Plan
For us, we often found that the manual cases that cannot be automated are exception cases, or cases that depend on external environment (for example malformed data, network connection not available, maintenance, first time guide...). These cases require special setup to simulate the environment when they happen.
Ideally, I believe it is possible to cover everything, given that you are prepared to go as far as you can to make it happen. But in reality, it is most often too much an effort needed that we prefer the hybrid approach of mixed manual-automatic test cases. We do, however, try to convert those exception cases over the time to automatic ones, by setting up separate environment to simulate exception cases and write automation tests against them.
Nevertheless, even with that effort, there would be cases when it's impossible to simulate, and I believe they should be covered by technical tests from engineers.
You could use an approach similar to the following example:
http://concordion.org/Example.html
When you use a build or continuous integration system to track your test runs, you could add simple specifications / tests for your manual cases that contain a text comparison (e.g. "pass" or "fail"). Then you would need to update the spec after each manual test run, check it in, and start the tests in your build / continuous Integration system. Then the manual results would be recorded together with the results of the automated test execution.
If you would use a tool like Concordion+ (https://code.google.com/p/concordion-plus/) you could even write a summary specification, which could contain scenarios for each of your manual tests. Each one would be reported as individual test result in your test execution environment.
Cheers
taking screen shots seems to be a good idea, you can still automate the verification but will need to go an extra mile. for instance when using Selenium you can add Sikuli(NB: u can't run headless test) to compare results (images) or take a screenshot with Robot (java.awt) use OCR to read text and assert or verify(TestNG)
I am struggling a bit with the way how to write tests that reproduce an issue that has not been yet fixed.
Should one write the test and use wrong expectations and once the bug is fixed the developer will see the failure and adjust the expectations or should one just write the test with correct expectations and disable it. Once it is fixed you have to enable it again.
I would prefer the way to define wrong expectations and add the correct ones in comments and once I fix an issue I will immediately get a notification that it fails. If I disable it I won't see it failing and it will probably stay disabled until one will discover this test.
Are there any other ways doing this?
Thanks for your comments.
Martin
Ideally you would write a test that reproduces the bug and then fix said bug.
If for whatever reason that is not currently an option I would say that your approach of having the wrong expectations would be better than having an ignored test. Assuming that you use some clear variable name/ method name / comments that the test is more a placeholder and not the desired outcome.
One thing that I've done is write a test that is a "time bomb" reminder. I pick a date that is a few weeks/months out from now that I expect to be able to get back to it or have it fixed by. If I end up having to push the date out 2 or 3 times I end up deleting the test because it must not be that important.
as #Jarred said, best way is to write a test that express the correct expectations, check if it fails, then fix production code and see the test passes.
if it's not an option then remember that tests are not only to test but also to document. so write a test that document how your program does actually work. if necessary add a comment to the test. and don't write tests that are ignored - it's pointless. in future you can refactor your code many times, you could accidentally fix this test or introduce even more error in this area. writing tests that are intended to be long term ignored is just a waste of time.
don't be afraid that you will forget about that particular bug/test, just create a ticket in your issue tracking system - that's what it's made for.
if you use a testing framework that supports groups, you can add all those tests to be able to instantly exclude those test if needed.
also i really don't like the concept of 'time bomb tests'. your build MUST be reproducible - that's the fundamental assumption of release management, continuous integration, ability to pass your code to another team etc. tests are not meant to track and remind about the issues, it's the job of the issue tracking system. seriously, don't do it
Actually I thought about this again. We are using JUnit and it supports defining expectations on exceptions via #Test(expected=Exception.class).
So what one can do is write the test with the desired expectations and define the test with #Test(expected=AssertionError.class). Once the test will be fixed the test starts failing and the developer has to remove the expectation.
Can any one please tell me is there any kind of tools or eclipse base plugins available for generate relevant test cases for SalesForce platform related Apex classes. It seems with code coverage they are not expecting out come like we expect with JUnit, they want to cover whether, test cases are going through the flows of the source classes (like code go through).
Please don't get this post in wrong, I don't want anyone is going to write test cases for my codes :). I have post this question due to nature of SalesForce expecting that code coverage should be. Thanks.
Although Salesforce requires a certain percentage of code coverage for your test cases, you really need to be writing cases that check the results to ensure that the code behaves as designed.
So, even if there was a tool that could generate code to get 100% coverage of your test class, it wouldn't be able to test the results of those method calls, leaving you with a false sense of having "tested code".
I've found that breaking up long methods into separate, sometimes static, methods makes it easier to do unit testing. You can test each individual method, and not worry so much about tweaking parameters to a single method so that it covers all execution paths.
it's now possible to generate test classes automatically for your class/trigger/batch. You can install "Test Class Generator" app from AppExchange and see it working.
This would really help you generating test class and saves lot of your development time.
Our rails development team tries to follow Continuous Integration. We have decided to adopt a policy of only committing features whose tests pass. Is that a good way to go on? Should I delay integrating with other one's features until my tests pass(Even if the partial part of the feature works ok)? Thanks in advance
The tests should pass--if you're running a CI server it'll just spam people with emails until they do. Without a CI server everyone else will have to figure out if those tests are "supposed" to fail. Boo.
Another option is to only check in tests for actually-written features; if you're using tests as an executable specification they wouldn't all pass until the entire app was done and nobody would be able to check anything in ever.
You may also be able to mark tests as "pending" or indicate they should be skipped, but remembering to un–pend/-skip them is often problematic.
The tests SHOULD PASS that's the reason why you are writing them in the first place, if for some reason one or more tests do not pass, it indicates that something went wrong (obviously) and you and your team should be working on the solution.
If the code were committed with test failures, spam mails blaming the programmer who did it, this way the next time he will pay more attention before committing code
I have heard one way to avoid committing code with test failures but I have not personally tested, it involves to have two repositories (it could be a branch), the theory behind is:
The developers commits will target a branch, the purpose of this branch is just to guarantee that all tests pass, you should configure your CI server to build and run tests from this branch
When all the tests pass in the branch, a merge should be done to the trunk, since everyone should be working on this branch the merge should be transparent and automatic
I repeat I have not tested this approach and in my opinion it involves more problems than it solves
Another alternative could be to add a hook to the commit event in your VCS and force to run all tests but this could be time consuming just to perform a single commit
As additional info you could check this response
https://stackoverflow.com/a/7110774/1268570
I would wait personally to the test passes before I intergrate other features.
Where i am working we have the following issue:
Our current test procedure is that our business analyst test the release based on their specifications/tests. If it passes these tests it is given to the quality dept where they test the new release and the entire system to check if something else was broken.
Just to mention that we outsource our development. Unfortunately the release given to us is rarely tested by the developers and thats "the relationship" we have with them these last 7 years....
As a result if the patch/release fails the tests at the functionality testing level or at the quality level with each patch given we need to test the whole thing again not just the release.
Is there a way we can prevent this from happening?
You have two options:
Separate the code into independent modules so that a patch/change in one module only means you have to re-test that one module. However, due to dependencies this is effective only to a very limited degree.
Introduce automated tests so that re-testing is not as expensive. It takes some more work at fist, but will definitely pay off in your scenario. You don't have to do unit test or TDD - integration tests based on capture-replay tools are often easier to introduce in your scenario (established project with manual testing process).
Implement a continuous testing framework that you and the developers can access. Someething like CruiseControl.Net and NUnit to automate the functional tests.
Given access, they'll be able to see nightly tests on the build. Heck, they don't even need to test it themselves, your tests will be being run every night (or regularly), and they'll know straight away what faults they've caused, or fixed, if any.
Define a 'Quality SLA' - namely that all unit tests must pass, all new code must have a certain level of coverage, all new code must have a certain score in some static analysis checker.
Of course anything like this can be gamed, so have regular post release debriefs where you discuss areas of concern and put in place contingency to avoid it in future.
Implement GO server with Dashboard and handle with GO Agent GUI at your end.
http://www.thoughtworks-studios.com/forms/form/go/downloadlink text