Shared (relatively less) pain of using Protractor in SeConf London 2016

On 15th Nov 2016, I spoke in Selenium Conference London 2016 on the topic - "Sharing the 'pain' of using Protractor & WebDriver". This time, the pain was less - as I had already shared this in Selenium Conference India 2016. From that experience, and lot of interactions, I worked on some of the challenges I was facing and implemented good solutions for the same.

So this time it was easier.

The interesting challenge though was when the A/V stopped working after the 1st slide - and had to do on-the-spot improv to keep the ball rolling and prevent delays in subsequent talks. To know more about the fun I had, watch the video linked below :)

You will find the abstract, slides and video of the talk:

Abstract

There is a saying ..."Sukh baatne se badhta hai, dukh baatne se kam hota hai", translated as - "happiness increases & sadness reduces on sharing with others".

We want to take this opportunity to share with our experiences - the good and the bad, in the journey of building a Test Automation framework for an AngularJS based application.

We will learn, by a case study, what thought process we applied on the given context (product, team, skills, capabilities, long term vision) to come up with an appropriate Test Automation Strategy. This Test Automation strategy covered all aspects of Test Automation - Unit, Integration, UI - i.e. End-2-End tests (E2E).

Next, we will share how we went about narrowing-down, and eventually selecting a specific Tech Stack + Tools (Javascript / Jasmine / Protractor / Selenium-WebDriver) to accomplish the Test Automation for the product.
 
Lastly, we will share the challenges that came up in the implementation of the Test Automation, and how we overcame them. This will also include how we managed to get the tests running in Jenkins - a Continuous Integration tool.

This discussion is applicable to all team members who are working on Test Automation!

P.S. We will be attempting to make a sample protractor-based automation framework available on github for anyone to use as a starting point for setting up protractor-based Test Automation framework.

Slides

Sharing (less) Pain of using Protractor & WebDriver from Anand Bagmar

Video

https://youtu.be/YpEC3rFkH5

 

Sharing the pain in Automating with Protractor & WebDriver

As mentioned in my earlier post titled "Taking Protractor to the next level", on 25th June 2016, Nikitha Iyer and I spoke in Selenium Conference 2016, Bangalore, India on "Sharing the pain in Automating with Protractor & WebDriver".

The video is finally available and I am now able to share (see below) all the details of the talk from one post.

Abstract

There is a saying ..."Sukh baatne se badhta hai, dukh baatne se kam hota hai", translated as - "happiness increases & sadness reduces on sharing with others".

We want to take this opportunity to share with our experiences - the good and the bad, in the journey of building a Test Automation framework for an AngularJS based application. 

We will learn, by a case study, what thought process we applied on the given context (product, team, skills, capabilities, long term vision) to come up with an appropriate Test Automation Strategy. This Test Automation strategy covered all aspects of Test Automation - Unit, Integration, UI - i.e. End-2-End tests (E2E).

Next, we will share how we went about narrowing-down, and eventually selecting a specific Tech Stack + Tools (Javascript / Jasmine / Protractor / Selenium-WebDriver) to accomplish the Test Automation for the product.

Lastly, we will share the challenges that came up in the implementation of the Test Automation, and how we overcame them. This will also include how we managed to get the tests running in Jenkins - a Continuous Integration tool. 

This discussion is applicable to all team members who are working on Test Automation!

P.S. We will be attempting to make a sample protractor-based automation framework available on github for anyone to use as a starting point for setting up protractor-based Test Automation framework.

Slides

Sharing the pain using Protractor from Anand Bagmar

Video

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

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! :)

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Learnings from Selenium Conference 2016, Bangalore

The value one gets by attending any conference / training / meetup / etc. is subjective to various aspects, some of which are mentioned below (in no particular order):

• Individual skills & capabilities
• Past experiences
• Existing knowledge / information / expertise on the subject 
• Open mindedness
• Willingness to learn
• Current work (tools & tech stack, challenges, risks, priorities, backlog, tech debt, team members, etc.)

The above aspects definitely played a part in what takeaways I had from the recently concluded Selenium Conference 2016 in Bangalore as well.

Here are my key takeaways, which I am going to work on learning more about, or implementing in the near future - special thanks to +Dave Haeffner , +Marcus Merrell , +Simon Stewart, +Bret Pettichord for helping me find these takeaways as part of various conversations during these few days.

• Related to Protractor
• Use Proxy Server in tests (Protractor framework) to capture HAR file on specific actions (AJAX calls) - and capture performance metrics from the same
• Read and experiment with the Marionette driver for Firefox - maybe it helps me overcome some of my challenges with Firefox & Maps in CI environment (headless using xvfb)
• Remove "phantomJS" as a supported browser from my framework by ensuring headless tests work with Chrome & Firefox using xvfb
• Highlight element when running tests before taking screenshots - will help in debugging
• Experiment with different loggers & reporters - Allure, Winston logger
• Better "promise" handling in framework to keep abstraction layers sane
• Revive WAAT - Web Analytics Automation Testing Framework - create new plugin using Proxy Server approach. Also remove Omniture Debugger and HttpSniffer plugin.
• Refocus energy on TTA - Test Trend Analyzer.
• Keep vodQA going strong - its a good community initiative

See you all in Selenium Conference UK in November 2016!

Taking Protractor to the next level

As I got onto a project early this year - my paths crossed again with Protractor / Angular / JavaScript. Despite my past experiences with this tech stack, I needed to remain positive when approaching this challenge.

In this case, the context was quite different. That said, the challenges, though reduced compared to my first attempt at using Protractor effectively, were still around. 

I had posted a set of questions on my blog, various LinkedIn and facebook groups - and got a lot of suggestions and advice how to proceed. Thanks to all of them, it did make my life easier.

Then, as part of Selenium Conference 2016 held in Bangalore on 24-25th June 2016, my friend and colleague - +Nikita Iyer and I spoke about "Sharing the Pain of Automating with Protractor & WebDriver". The intention was multi-fold:

• We wanted to share what challenges we had faced on the team when using Protractor, and also how we overcame certain challenges. This was to help others in similar situations to learn from our mistakes & solutions.
• We also wanted to learn from the attendees what other challenges & solutions they had come up with in their experiences with this Protractor tool-stack.

I am very happy to say that we were successful in achieving both these objectives quite successfully.

Below is the details from the talk.

Abstract

There is a saying ..."Sukh baatne se badhta hai, dukh baatne se kam hota hai", translated as - "happiness increases & sadness reduces on sharing with others".

We want to take this opportunity to share with our experiences - the good and the bad, in the journey of building a Test Automation framework for an AngularJS based application. 

We will learn, by a case study, what thought process we applied on the given context (product, team, skills, capabilities, long term vision) to come up with an appropriate Test Automation Strategy. This Test Automation strategy covered all aspects of Test Automation - Unit, Integration, UI - i.e. End-2-End tests (E2E).

Next, we will share how we went about narrowing-down, and eventually selecting a specific Tech Stack + Tools (Javascript / Jasmine / Protractor / Selenium-WebDriver) to accomplish the Test Automation for the product.

Lastly, we will share the challenges that came up in the implementation of the Test Automation, and how we overcame them. This will also include how we managed to get the tests running in Jenkins - a Continuous Integration tool. 

This discussion is applicable to all team members who are working on Test Automation!

P.S. We will be attempting to make a sample protractor-based automation framework available on github for anyone to use as a starting point for setting up protractor-based Test Automation framework.

Slides

Sharing the pain using Protractor from Anand Bagmar

Video

- will be updated once available

Pictures

Test Data - Food for Test Automation Framework at Selenium Conference 2016

[Updated - Pictures added, Video added]

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

Here is some information about the session - 

Abstract

Building a Test Automation Framework is easy - there are so many resources / guides / blogs / etc. available to help you get started and help solve the issues you get along the journey.

Teams already building 1000s of tests of various types - UI, web service-based, integration, unit, etc. is a proof of that.

However, building a "good" Test Automation Framework is not very easy. There are a lot of principles and practices you need to use, in the right context, with a good set of skills required to make the Test Automation Framework maintainable, scalable and reusable.

In this talk, we will focus on one of the critical aspects and patterns in building the Test Automation framework - Test Data!

We will look at different data patterns as options and techniques how to create, manage, use, reuse Test Data in a way to keep the tests running in an reliable and deterministic way. We will also discuss what questions to ask, what things to think about in selecting your approach for Test Data!

This discussion will be applicable for any type of Test Automation (web / mobile / desktop), but, we will focus primarily on UI automation frameworks, ex. using Selenium.

Slides

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

Video

Pictures