Announcing vodQA Bangalore on May 18, 2013

ThoughtWorks is happy to announce yet another edition of the vodQA Bangalore happening on Saturday, 18th May 2013.
 
We take this opportunity to extend the invite to speakers and attendees for this event. Below is the mailer, with the event details. If you have a topic that you would like to present, please register with us. 

The vodQA event hosted by ThoughtWorks is being held the third time in Bangalore. We look forward to enlightening topics and proficient presenters, we look forward for your support and help on this. Please extend this invite to all your personal contacts whom you think will make a big impact at the event.

Note: Registration for Speakers close on 13th April' 2013.

Some important links:

Event page: get-set-test

Register as speaker

Register as attendee

thucydides for ATDD / BDD / BDT?

Anyone heard or used the tool "thucydides"-  for ATDD / BDD / BDT before?

Whats your review / thoughts on it? Any pros / cons? 

http://www.thucydides.info/
https://github.com/thucydides-webtests/thucydides

From their website: "Thucydides is a tool that lets you use WebDriver-based unit or BDD tests to write more flexible and more reusable WebDriver-based tests, and also to generate documentation about your acceptance tests, including a narrative description of test, along with the corresponding screen shots, and also high-level summaries and aggregations of the test results."

Security testing tools

Here is some information / links to potential tools / resources to use for security testing:

• KromCAT: http://firecat.toolswatch.org/kromcat/
• WebSecurify extension for Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/websecurify
• safe3si: https://code.google.com/p/safe3si/ - seems interesting, for penetration testing
• Havij v1.16 Advanced SQL Injection: http://www.itsecteam.com/products/havij-v116-advanced-sql-injection/
• sqlninja: http://sqlninja.sourceforge.net/
• owasp (The Open Web Application Security Project): https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Testing_for_SQL_Injection_(OWASP-DV-005)
• sqlmap: http://sqlmap.org/

TaaS (Test-as-a-Service) coming to Sri Lanka and Delhi

Riding on the good response received on TaaS in 2012 and early 2013, I will be speaking more on the same in Colombo, Sri Lanka on 7th March 2013, and in Delhi on 14th March 2013. Looking forward to more feedback on TaaS!

What should be the new name for TaaS?

I have got a lot of interesting and valuable feedback for TaaS - Test-as-a-Service. One thing that stands out which people want is a different name for TaaS - since it does cause a lot of confusion with the business vertical of "Testing as a Service".

So, I am taking all this feedback seriously and considering changing the name of TaaS - before I publish the gem.

Since TaaS is essentially an orchestrator of your end-2-end Integration tests, some thoughts on potential names, with their meanings are:

• khansama - kindly suggested by Erik Petersen. A great contextual Indian name for a great tool that co-ordinates and organizes the testing.
• vahak - Sanskrit word - meaning Transporter, Conveyor, Carrier, Conduit
• dwar - Sanskrit word - meaning Door, Inlet, Outlet, Gate, Through, 
• honcho - leader, manager
• comptroller - controller
• relegate - refer to another for decision
• transmit - communicate

What do you think? What name do you like? Any other suggestions for better name?

rubygems.org & WAAT

With the recent problems the rubygems.org site is facing, you may not be able to get to the WAAT gem. In that case, you can also download the gem directly from the github repository. All information about WAAT can be found from my blog as before.

TaaS received pretty well in Pune conf

As mentioned in my earlier post, I spoke about TaaS - Test-as-a-Service in UNICOM's Next Generation Testing Conference in Pune on 23rd Jan. The talk went pretty well. Since this talk was for a slightly smaller duration, I had to use a scaled down version of the same slides that I used in the TaaS talk in Mumbai. The audio playback of the talk in Pune is available here.

There were a lot of interesting questions that came up this time:
1. Can I use TaaS to test in the cloud?
2. Can I use TaaS to do load / performance testing?
3. What are the security implications of using TaaS? 
4. Can I use TaaS to do mobile testing across different devices?

I will try to address these questions in subsequent posts.

Take a nap ... its good for you

... or so the research about "What Are the Facts About Naps?" says.

I particularly like #6.

So if someone finds me napping at work, I blame the article. :)

WAAT-Ruby crosses 1000 downloads on rubygems

Feeling very happy - the WAAT-ruby gem has crossed 1000 downloads from rubygems.org.

Taking video recordings of your test execution

I have always wanted to take video recordings of my test execution ... discard the video if the test passes, and save it if the test fails. 

Recently, I found that the headless gem does that for you. There is also some sample code to make the integration of this gem in your test framework very seamless.

While using the gem and its api's are very straightforward, this did not work very well for me.

Reasons:

1. I run my tests from various different types of machines / os, namely, mac, RHEL and Windows
2. The total number of machines I can run my tests from is huge (>20)  … mainly triggered via CI
3. The RHEL environment is controlled and configured by puppet.
4. There is a bunch of underlying library requirements for the video capture

So though it is easy to use the gem, it is not really easy to setup ALL test execution environments with these dependent libraries for this to work - at least for me.

Does anyone know of a better / easier solution?