Getting started with implementing Automation

Getting started with implementing tests for automation (web or native apps) may seem daunting for those who are doing this for the first time. 

Assuming you are using open-source tooling like Selenium or Appium, there are multiple ways you can get started.

1. DIY - Build your own framework by scripting based on the documentation

2. Use Selenium-IDE for quick record and playback

3. Use TestProject Recorder for quick record and playback

4. Use TestProject SDK to build your own custom scripts for automating the tests
   
   

Each of the above approaches has its own pros-and-cons. Let's look at this in some detail:

Approach #1 - DIY - Build your own framework

Selenium: https://www.selenium.dev/documentation/en/

Appium: https://appium.io/docs/en/about-appium/intro/

Pros	Cons
You can build all features and capabilities as per your design & requirement	*You need to learn a programming language
	*You have to build everyone on your own (though you can use supporting libraries)

* Depending on the context of the team, the above points can also be considered as an advantage

Approach #2 - Selenium-IDE

https://www.selenium.dev/selenium-ide

Pros	Cons
Easy to set up	Basic reports
Works in Chrome & Firefox	Works only for automating Web applications
Code can be exported in various formats
Recorded tests can be run from command line
Tests can be run in your own CI
Will always be in-sync with underlying WebDriver

Approach #3 - TestProject Recorder

https://testproject.io/easy-test-automation/

Pros	Cons
Advanced recorder (lot of actions, validations, self-healing, customisations possible, and a lot of community Addons)	Recorder works only in Chrome, but tests can be executed on all browsers
Recorder works for Web applications as well as Native Apps (in real devices or emulators) for Android and iOS (even iOS on Windows machine)	Generated code is very simple - good as a reference to see how the underlying implementation / interaction is done
TestProject agent automatically determines all available browsers available and devices connected to the machine and execution can be customised accordingly	Each recorded test needs to be exported individually. No concept of reuse in this approach
Can schedule test runs as one-time, or repeated activity via build-in scheduler / CI/CD tool integrations or via their RESTful API
Reports are comprehensive with meaningful data, including screenshots and option to download to PDF format
Code can be generated from the recorded script
Can share tests easily using the "Share test" feature

Approach #4 - TestProject SDK

https://testproject.io/advanced-scripting-capabilities

Pros	Cons
Probably the most powerful way of these 4 approaches as it uses WebDriver / Appium under the hood. Get the power of building your own framework, while reusing out-of-the-box features like driver management, automatic reporting, etc.	You need to learn a programming language
Driver management is TestProject responsibility. Test implementer can focus on automating tests

Long time no see? Where have I been

It has been a few months since I published anything on my blog. Does not mean I have not been learning or experimenting with new ideas. In fact, in the past few months I have been privileged to have my articles published on Applitools and Test Project blogs.

Below is the link to all those articles, for which I have received very kind reviews and comments on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Apart from this, I have also been contributing to open source - namely - Selenium, AppiumTestDistribution and building an open-source kickstarter project for API testing using Karate and for end-2-end testing for Android, iOS, Windows, Mac & Web.

Lastly, I have also been speaking in virtual conferences, webinars and last week I also recorded a podcast, which will be available soon.

The end of Smoke, Sanity and Regression

https://applitools.com/blog/end-smoke-sanity-regression/

Do we need Smoke, Sanity, Regression suites?

• Do not blindly start with classifying your tests in different categories. Challenge yourself to do better!
• Have a Test Automation strategy and know your test automation framework objective & criteria (“Test Automation in the World of AI & ML” highlights various criteria to be considered to build a good Test Automation Framework)
• Choose the toolset wisely
• After all the correct (subjective) approaches taken, if your test execution (in a single browser) is still taking more than say, 10 min for execution, then you can run your tests in parallel, and subsequently, split the test suite into smaller suites which can give you progressive indication of quality
• Applitools with its AI-power algorithms can make your functional tests lean, simple, robust and includes UI / UX validation
• Applitools Ultrafast Grid will remove the need for Cross-Browser testing, and instead with a single test execution run, validate functionality & UI / Visual rendering for all supported Browsers & Viewports

Design Patterns in Test Automation

https://blog.testproject.io/2020/06/29/design-patterns-in-test-automation/
 

Criteria for building a Test Automation Framework

Writing code is easy, but writing good code is not as easy. Here are the reasons why I say this:

• “Good” is subjective.
• “Good” depends on the context & overall objective.

Similarly, implementing automated test cases is easy (as seen from the getting started example shared earlier). However, scaling this up to be able to implement and run a huge number of tests quickly and efficiently, against an evolving product is not easy!

I refer to a few principles when building a Test Automation Framework. They are:

• Based on the context & (current + upcoming) functionality of your product-under-test, define the overall objective of Automation Testing.
• Based on the objective defined above, determine the criteria and requirements from your Test Automation Framework. Refer to my post on “Test Automation in the World of AI & ML” for details on various aspects you need to consider to build a robust Test Automation Framework. Also, you might find these articles interesting to learn how to select the best tool for your requirements:
• Criteria for Selecting the Right Functional Testing Tools
• How to Select the Best Tool – Research Process
• How To Select The Right Test Automation Tool

Stop the Retries in Tests & Reruns of Failing Tests

https://applitools.com/blog/uncover-flaky-tests/
 

Takeaways

• Recognise reasons why tests could be flaky / intermittent
• Critique band-aid approach to fixing flakiness in tests
• Discuss techniques to identify reasons for test flakiness
• Fix the root-cause, not the symptoms to make your tests stable, robust and scalable!

Measuring Code Coverage from API Workflow & Functional UI Tests

https://blog.testproject.io/2020/11/24/measuring-code-coverage-from-api-workflow-functional-ui-tests/

 
Why is the Functional Coverage important?

I choose an approach keeping the 80-20 rule in mind. The information the report provides should be sufficient to understand the current state, and take decisions on “what’s next”. For areas that need additional clarity, I can then talk with the team, explore the code to get to the next level of details. This makes it a very collaborative way of working, and joint-ownership of quality! 🚀

You can choose your own way to implement Functional Coverage – based on your context of team, skills, capability, tech-stack, etc.

Questions at at Taquelah - Does your functional automation really add value?

I spoke at Taquelah Lightning Talks on one of my favorite topics - 

Does your functional automation really add value?

 

You can find the slides here  - https://www.slideshare.net/abagmar/does-your-functional-automation-really-add-value

Some references:

https://essenceoftesting.blogspot.com/2020/07/does-your-functional-automation-really.html

https://essenceoftesting.blogspot.com/2020/03/tracking-functional-coverage.html

Waiting for parallel features to complete in Karate / IntelliJ

Anyone using KarateDSL (https://github.com/intuit/karate) getting the below mentioned error?

[main] INFO http://com.intuit.karate.Runner - waiting for parallel features to complete ...

Restarting IntelliJ did not help.

Karate version: 0.9.5

JDK: Adopt Open JDK 11.0.8

Any tips / idea how to resolve it?

Does your functional automation really add value?

We all know that automation is one of the key enablers for those on the CI-CD journey.

Most teams are:

• implementing automation
• talking about its benefits
• up-skilling themselves
• talking about tooling
• etc.

However, many a times I feel we are blinded because of the theoretical value test automation provides, or because everyone says it adds value, or because of the shiny tools / tech-stacks we get to use , or ...

To try and understand more about this, can you answer the below questions?

In your experience, or in your current project:

1. Does your functional automation really add value?
2. What makes you say it does / or does not?
3. How long does it take for tests to run and generate reports?
4. In most cases, the product-under-test is available on multiple platforms – ex: Android & iOS Native, and on Web. In such cases, for the same scenario that needs to be automated, is the test implemented once for all platforms, or once per platform?
5. How easy is it to debug and get to the root cause of failures?
6. How long does it take to update an existing test?
7. How long does it take to add a new test?
8. Do your tests run automatically via CI on a new build, or do you need to “trigger” the same?
9. What is the test passing percentage?
10. Do you “rerun” the failing tests to see if this was an intermittent issue?
11. Is there control on the level of parallel execution and switch to sequential execution based on context?
12. How clean & DRY is the code?

In my experience, unfortunately most of the functional automation that is built is:
· not optimal
· not fit-for-purpose
· does not run fast enough
· gives inconsistent feedback, hence unreliable

Hence, for the amount of effort invested in implementing automation,

1. Are you really getting the value from this activity?
2. How can automation truly provide value for teams?
   

Tracking functional coverage from your api / functional UI (e2e) tests

Tracking and having a high coverage of your product code via automated tests is an important way of building a quality product.

It is easy to measure code coverage when running unit tests. You will find a plethora of tools (free & commercial) with a variety of features for any programming language you may be using. You can integrate these tools as part of your pre-commit hooks (i.e. you will not be able to push your code to version control if the limits set for code coverage fall below the minimum limit set), and also as part of your CI builds (i.e. fail the build if the code coverage limit falls below the expected limit).

The reason capturing code coverage works easily for unit tests, and maybe integration tests, is that these tests run in isolation, directly on the code. You do not need to have the product deployed to any environment to run the tests to measure the coverage. I found these great resources you can check out to understand more about how code coverage works:
http://www.semdesigns.com/Company/Publications/TestCoverage.pdf
https://confluence.atlassian.com/clover/about-code-coverage-71599496.html

However, very frequently this question comes up - how can we measure code coverage of the API tests, or of the functional UI (e2e / end-2-end) tests? I remember this question coming up since the past 8-10 years at least. Every time, I have given the same answer because I have not come across, nor seen any better way of answering this question. It is time I wrote it down for easier access to others as well.

Solution #1

Preconditions:

A big criteria for the above strategy to work is to ensure the environment is isolated - i.e. NO ONE is using the environment (for navigating through the product, testing of any kind other than the tests being triggered to measure coverage).

• Deploy the product-under-test to an isolated environment, and start measuring code coverage. 
• Then trigger the API / UI tests, 
• That will tell you how much code coverage is achieved by these tests.

The above answer has some big gaps though:

• What are you trying to understand from the code coverage of your API / UI tests? What value will it bring to the team? How will it make the product better?
• Do you expect the code coverage of your API / UI tests to be similar / identical / better than the unit tests? IF yes, we need to have a different conversation about the Test Pyramid

 

Solution #2

However, I believe there is a better approach to this. 

Based on the Test Automation Pyramid shown above, the API / Web Service tests and UI tests are business facing tests. In this case, it will add more value to measure what functional / component coverage the tests have. 

With this approach, the code coverage from the Technology Facing Tests (Unit / Integration / ...) will focus on technical aspects of coverage, and the Business Facing Tests (API / UI) will focus on functional aspects of coverage. 

When looked at together, this will give a better sense of understanding of the overall quality of the product.

Tracking Functional Coverage

So, how can we track functional coverage? 

Unfortunately, there does not seem to be an out-of-the-box way to do this. But below is how I have implemented this before:

• I used cucumber-jvm in my test framework
• For each (end-2-end Test) Scenario, in addition to the tags required for the test (as per the test framework design), I added the following types of tags to the test:
• functional areas touched by the test
• components / modules touched by the test
• I used cucumber-reporting plugin to generate rich, html reports
• The beauty of the reports generated by cucumber-reporting reports is that I can now see for my test execution the different statistics of the tags when the tests ran. 
• Below is an example for the cucumber-reporting github page:

 

• With this report, you can now get to know:
• the overall tag execution state for the complete test run
• the number of times the tag was run as part of how many test scenarios
• drill down into tag-specific reports as well

Why is the above report important?

As mentioned above, I am adding custom tags to each scenario - based on module / functionality / etc. If there is any critical functionality of my product, I would want to have more concentration of tests covering that feature / module, compared to others. 

Another way to visualize the tag statistics is in form of tag heat maps. You want your critical functionality to have a good sized bubble in the heat map. Also, any small bubbles, or non-existing bubbles would mean you do not have coverage for that feature / module.

The above example is one of the easiest ways to implement feature coverage for API / UI tests. But it is very likely you are not using cucumber-jvm, and cucumber-reporting plugin. But if this approach makes sense to you, then you could very easily implement it in your test framework, using the constructs and features of that programming language and tools.

Overcoming chromedriver version compatibility issues the right way

I encountered an interesting challenge recently when doing Native Android / iOS app automation - this was related to Chrome browser versions getting updated automatically and my tests failing because of errors like:

org.openqa.selenium.SessionNotCreatedException: session not created: This version of ChromeDriver only supports Chrome version 74 23:04:25 (Driver info: chromedriver=74.0.3729.6 (255758eccf3d244491b8a1317aa76e1ce10d57e9-refs/branch-heads/3729@{#29}),platform=Windows NT 6.3.9600 x86_64) (WARNING: The server did not provide any stacktrace information)

So I asked a question on LinkedIn


And I tweeted asking how to manage ChromeDriver version when running WebDriver / Appium tests.

I have a #appium / #java #framework.
What is a good way to keep #chromedriver updated with version of #chrome via #scripts? I do not want to do this manually - since I have 3+ #jenkins agents (#linux + #mac mini) and 7+ team members who need to keep doing this #osx #command

— Anand Bagmar (@BagmarAnand) September 20, 2019

The answer was common and obvious – use WebDriverManager. This is a beautiful, simple and indeed the right answer and solution to the problem.

However, that was a partial answer for me. 

Here is my context and problem statement in detail:

• My Test Automation Framework is based on Java / Appium and I use AppiumTestDistribution (ATD) 
• ATD is open-source, and takes away my pain and effort of managing appium and the devices and also takes care of running the tests in parallel or distributed mode, on android as well as iOS
• In my local lab setup, I have many different android devices connected - which run tests as directed by ATD
• Since you cannot control how Google PlayStore / Apple App Store pushes out new versions of apps for different android / iOS versions on devices, it is easily possible to end up with different versions of chrome browser in your device lab. When this happens, the tests start failing because of chromedriver incompatibility issues.

Once I was very kindly reminded by the community about WebDriverManager (which I had forgotten about), I now knew what was to be done.

I looked at the ATD code, and realised that it was using the default chromedriver version as setup when I had installed appium. This chromedriver was being used when instantiating a new instance of the AndroidDriver.

So I submitted a PR for ATD - which essentially did the following:

• Query the chrome browser versions on each connected device
• For the **highest version of the browser, use WebDriverManager and get the appropriate chromedriver downloaded
• Pass the path to the correct chromedriver when creating an instance of the AndroidDriver

**highest version - what does that mean? Well, I also got confused initially. But the answer was simple. On some devices, the Chrome browser is installed by default, as a system app. This cannot be removed. So as new versions of the browser get installed, the default Chrome system app is always there. So when you query for the versions of Chrome on the device, you will see 2 such versions. My code logic was to get all these versions, and pick the highest version from them.

Here is the code snippet of how I solved the problem:

Special thanks to Sai Krishna for quickly approving and merging this PR.

Hope this provides more information about my problem statement, and how I used your suggestion for WebDriverManager to solve the problem.

Analytics - The Brain of the Software

An Analogy 

I am not a doctor, nor did I enjoy biology too much in my curriculum as a student.  However, I do know that the body has many organs and each organ plays a vital role in the well being of the individual.

Each organ has to:

• function correctly (movement, senses, core functions, etc.)

• has to perform as per expectations in different conditions the individual may be going through (walking, running, swimming, etc.)

• has to be secure from external parameters (heat, cold, rain, what we eat / drink, etc.)

• has to have a proper user experience (ex: if the human hands had webs like ducks, would we be able to hold a pen correctly to write?

• I would like to think of the brain as the super computer which keeps track of what is going on in the body, if each piece playing its part correctly, or not. And if there is something unexpected going on, then there are mechanisms of giving that feedback internally and externally so that course correction would be possible.

How does this relate to software?

Software is similar in some ways. For any software product to work, the following needs to be done:

Functionality works as expected

• The architecture, testability of the system will allow for various types of testing activities to be performed on the software to ensure everything works as expected
• Test Automation practices will give you quick feedback

There is a plethora of open-source and commercial tools in this space to help in this regard - the most popular open-source tools being Selenium and Appium.

Software is performant

• We can do performance testing at various different levels to ensure at different loads and conditions, the users will be able to use the product in a seamless fashion
• There are many tools to assist in Performance Testing - some popular ones being JMeter and Gatling.

Software is secure

• Building and testing for security is critical as you do not want user information to be leaked or manipulated and neither do you want to allow external forces to control / manipulate your product behaviour and control
• The Test Automation Pyramid hence also includes NFRs

User experience is validated, and consistent

• In the age of CD (Continuous Delivery & Continuous Deployment), you need to ensure your user experience across all your software delivery means (browsers, mobile-browsers, native apps for mobiles and tablets, etc.) is consistent and users do not face the brunt of UI / look-and-feel issues in the software at the cost of new features
• This is a relatively new domain - but there are already many tools to help in this spaces as well - the most popular one (in terms of integration, usage and features) being the AI-powered Applitools

Visual Validation is the new tip of the Test Automation Pyramid!

What is the brain of the software?

The above is all good, and known in various ways. But what is the "brain" of the software? How does one know if everything is working fine or not? Who will receive the feedback and how do we take corrective action on this?

Analytics is that piece in the Software product that functions as the brain. It keeps collecting data about each important piece of software, and provides feedback on the same.

I have come across some extreme examples of Business / Organizations who have all their eggs in one basket - in terms of

• understand their Consumers (engagement / usage / patterns / etc.),
• understand usage of product features, and,
• do all revenue-related book-keeping

This is all done purely on Analytics! Hence, to say “Business runs on Analytics, and it may be OK for some product / user features to not work correctly, but Analytics should always work” - is not a myth!

What this means is Analytics is more important now, than before.

Unfortunately, Analytics is not known much to the Software Dev + Test community. We know it very superficially - and do what is required to implement it and quickly test it out. But what is analytics? Why is it important? What is the impact of this not working well? Not many think about this.

I have been testing Analytics since 2010 ... and the kind of insights I have been able to get about the product have been huge! I have been able to contribute back to the team and help build better quality software as a result.

But I have to be honest - it is painful to test Analytics. And that is why I created an open-source framework - WAAT - to help automate some of this testing activities.

I also do workshops to help people learn more about Analytics, its importance, and how they can automate this as well.

In the workshop, I do not assume anything and approach is to discuss and learn by example and practice, the following

• How does Analytics works (for Web and Mobile)?
• Test Analytics manually in different ways
• Test Analytics via the final reports
• Why some Automation strategies will work, and some WILL NOT WORK (based on my experience)!
• We will see a demo of the Automation running for the same.
• Time permitting, we will setup running some Automation scripts on your machine to validate the same

Takeaways from the workshop

We will learn by practicing the following:

• What is Analytics?
• Techniques to test analytics manually.
• How to automate the validation of analytics, via a demo, and if time permits, run the automation from your machine as well.

Hope this post helps you understand the importance of Analytics and why you need to know more about it. Do reach out to me if you want to learn more about it.

Next upcoming Analytics workshop is in TestBash Australia 2019. Let me know if you would be interested in attending the same