Essence of Testing: July 2016

Tuesday, July 19, 2016

Slides & Video from Test Data - Food for Test Automation Framework

As posted earlier, I spoke about "Test Data - Food for your Test Automation Framework!" at Selenium Conference 2016 in Bangalore on 24th June 2016 in front of a packed and a very interactive audience. What a great time it was!

The video for that session is finally available! I have updated the original post as well as linked the slides & video with this post as well.

Video

Slides

Test Data - Food for your Test Automation Framework from Anand Bagmar

Wednesday, July 6, 2016

Any browsermob-proxy users facing issues with some requests not getting fired?

Is there anyone using browsermob-proxy who is having issues with some requests not getting fired?

I have integrated browsermob-proxy with my protractor tests. This works wonderfully when I run my tests from Mac (against local environment, or any other test environment).

However, when I run my tests from CI (agent is SUSE Enterprise 11.4) - my tests fail.

I narrowed down the problem to the following scenario:

On some specific user action in the UI, there are a lot (>100) of requests fired from the browser in parallel (batches). There are a couple of scenarios like this in my application - and the test fails in all these cases.

Here is a screenshot of what the captured HAR file shows -

The same test works when I run this locally from Mac

Any idea how to fix this? Thank you in advance!

See this issue for more details - (https://github.com/lightbody/browsermob-proxy/issues/492)

Tuesday, July 5, 2016

Any WAAT (Web Analytics Automation Testing Framework) users out there?

It has been over 2 years since any update to WAAT - Java or Ruby. Over the years, I have realised, and also received a lot of thoughts / feedback from users of WAAT around where it helps, and what challenges exist.

Also, given the widespread IoT & Big Data based work going on around the world, (Web) Analytics now plays a much bigger role in guiding business take better decisions.

WAAT (again) fits in the grand scheme of things very nicely as a framework to automate the validation of correct reporting of tags to any Web Analytics solution provider.

Hence, its a no-brainer for me - it is high time I work on some of the feedback and limitations of WAAT to make it usable again!

At the recently concluded Selenium Conference 2016 held in Bangalore, India, I got an idea of how to overcome a lot of challenges (listed below) and pain in using WAAT.

What's next?

To implement my new idea, this does mean a couple of things:

Existing plugins have limited use - and needs to be deleted.
A new plugin would need to be created - which may mean different set of APIs, and also different way to specify the test data.

Questions for you

Before I go ahead making these changes - I would like to get answers to the below questions (please add your answers directly in the comments):

Is anyone currently using WAAT? If yes -

which version (Java / Ruby)?
which plugin
Using HTTP / HTTPS?
Which Web Analytic solution are you using? (ex: Google Analytics, WebTrends, etc?)

Would you be interested in using the new WAAT? If yes -

Which language? Java / Ruby / JavaScript / Python / etc?

Would you like to contribute to implementing this new WAAT? If yes - contact me! :)

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Current plugins available in WAAT:

Omniture Debugger (WAAT-Java)

Pros:

OS independent
Run using regular-test-user

Cons:

Browser dependent - need to implement ScriptRunner for the UI-driver in use
Web-Analytic solution dependent - only for Adobe Marketing Clout / Omniture SiteCatalyst

HTTPSniffer (WAAT-Java, WAAT-Ruby)

Pros

Web-Analytic solution independent
Browser independent
UI-Driver independent

Cons

3rd party libraries are OS dependent
HTTPs is not supported out-of-the-box
Run tests as "root"

JSSniffer (WAAT-Java, WAAT-Ruby)

Pros

Web-Analytic solution independent
Browser independent
HTTPs supported out-of-the-box
No 3rd party library dependency

Cons

Need to write JavaScript to get the URL from the browser context
UI-Driver dependent

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Saturday, July 2, 2016

What is Web Analytics and how to Test it?

vodQA returned - this time with the theme - Testing Heuristics in ThoughtWorks, Hyderabad on 2nd July 2016.

Here I spoke about - "The What, Why and How of Web Analytics Testing".

Abstract

Learn what is Web Analytics, why is it important, and see some techniques how you can test it manually and and also automate that validation. But just knowing about Web Analytics is not sufficient for business now.

There are new kids in town - IoT and Big Data - two of the most used and heard-off buzz words in the Software Industry!

With IoT, with a creative mindset looking for opportunities and ways to add value, the possibilities are infinite. With each such opportunity, there is a huge volume of data being generated - which if analyzed and used correctly, can feed into creating more opportunities and increased value propositions.

There are 2 types of analysis that one needs to think about.
1. How is the end-user interacting with the product? This will give some level of understanding into how to re-position and focus on the true value add features for the product.
2. With the huge volume of data being generated by the end-user interactions, and the data being captured by all devices in the food-chain of the offering, it is important to identify patterns from what has happened, and find out new product / value opportunities based on usage patterns.

Slides

The What, Why and How of Web Analytics Testing (Web, IoT, Big Data) from Anand Bagmar

Video

PS: Apologies for the video quality - I am not seen very clearly - but the slides are bright & clear, and so is the audio - so the important aspects are covered!