Monday, January 14, 2013

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?


Friday, January 11, 2013

Mac Air video problem? This may work for you

I have been using a Mac Air for some time now. One thing that has been a constant frustration for me on this machine is for some reason, the in-built camera stops working. For example, when I try to use Google Hangout or Skype, I get the error - "There is no camera connected". 

The System Profiler shows the camera is there.

Strangely, on restarting the machine, the camera starts working.

After lot of digging around, I found a post by "madams end" here which solved the problem for me.

The solution is: 


Go to Terminal.app and run the command:

sudo killall VDCAssistant


This fixed the problem for me.

The next thing I did was simply created a alias for this command in my shell - and then whenever I encounter the problem, just execute this alias.

Thursday, January 3, 2013

TaaS (Test-as-a-Service) coming to Pune

2012 was a great year for me. I got the opportunity to share my learnings and open-source contributions in various conferences. 

2013 also seems to be starting off well. I will be talking in UNICOM's Next Generation Testing Conference, this time in Pune, on Wednesday, 23rd Jan. I will be repeating my talk from Mumbai on TaaS - Test-as-a-Service.

Friday, December 21, 2012

End-2-End automated Integration Testing using TaaS - Test as a Service

I spoke in Mumbai recently about an open-source framework created to assist in End-2-End automated Integration Testing using TaaS - Test as a Service. The slides for the talk are available here and audio here.

The session was planned for 1 hour. I managed to finish the talk in 50ish minutes, then then the Q&A went on for another 30ish minutes.

Plan is to create and publish TaaS as a gem on rubygems.org.

Looking forward to your comments / feedback for the same!!

Monday, December 17, 2012

Speaking in Bangalore about WAAT and Agile Testing


As mentioned in my earlier post, I spoke last week in UNICOM's Next Generation Testing Conference in Bangalore on 13th December. My talk was about the "The What, Why and How of Web Analytics Testing". The slides from the talk are available here on slideshare.net. The audio recording of the talk is available here. (You can download and use a player like VLC to listen to the recording.)

I had a great time speaking in this conference. My talk was probably the only very technical talk in the conference. Another thing I observed from the audience is that not many of them knew about Web Analytics. I managed to finish up my talk in 40 min, and surprisingly, for an audience who didn't know much about Web Analytics, there were no questions. BUT, in the lunch break and networking session, a lot of people came up to me and said they really enjoyed my talk, and will look forward to "seeing" more on how Web Analytics is used in their organisation. 

Also, there was a lot of interest and questions about Agile, and Agile Testing. This is a topic I can talk about for hours at length - and I controlled myself to a great extent to let other esteemed speakers also talk and answer questions about the same from the audience.

I ended up encouraging a lot of fellow speakers and attendees to think with an "open-mind" and be innovative and see how service organisations can provide "a good and true value" to customers, and why it is important to provide "good" solutions and ask the right and tough questions to the same! Also shared the concepts of TaaS with a few folks who potentially would be in similar soup with the "common test framework" concept.

All in all, a very good time in Bangalore. Now looking forward for the same in Mumbai on 18th December, where I will be talking about "Integration Testing in Enterprises - using TaaS (Test as a Service)".

Sunday, December 9, 2012

December 2012 conferences - WAAT & TaaS it is!

December seems to be a busy time related to conferences for me.

First, I attended test-ed 2012 conference hosted by moolya where I had the opportunity to meet James Bach and a few other great speakers. 

I was a little let-down by James talk. It seemed like more of a marketing pitch for moolya - and somehow I felt I expected more from a person of his caliber! None-the-less, I am sure he inspired a lot of folks in the auditorium to become a free and innovative tester! 

I also got to talk with him 1-1 about BDD and what situations it works well, and more importantly, when it does not work well. Also spoke with him on how BDT (Behavior Driven Testing) helps in building the "right automated regression suite" and the challenges facing the Testers in India in order to become the "free-spirited, creative and innovative testers" he spoke about.

Next, on 13th December, I am speaking in UNICOM's Next Generation Testing Conference in Bangalore about "The What, Why, and How of Web Analytics Testing". I will be talking about my open-source framework - "WAAT - the Web Analytics Automation Testing", and how that can ease the manual drudge of web analytics testing.

To close the year, I will be speaking on 18th December in another UNICOM's Next Generation Testing Conference in Mumbai. Here I will be talking about "Integration testing in Enterprises using TaaS (Test-as-a-Service)- Via Case Study". This is about another open-source framework I have created - TaaS - Test as a Service.

Hope to see you all in Bangalore / Mumbai.

Monday, November 5, 2012

vodqa - Going Beyond the Usual updates

Our recently concluded vodQA Pune, on 13th October 2012(http://testing.thoughtworks.com/events/going-beyond-the-usual), was a huge success. Your participation, questions, comments and feedback helped us take this event to new heights. We thank you for that.

The first set of videos from this edition of vodQA are now available here: 
http://bit.ly/YtNwje, and some of thepictures are available here: http://bitly.com/TEWwjQ

Here are the links for the some of the talks that were held at vodQA:

- Opening note by Tarang Baxi 
YouTube: http://bitly.com/VN83v0

Automated Infrastructure Testing - Ranjib Dey
YouTube: http://bitly.com/QhpYgz
Slides: http://bitly.com/UbSBgD

The World Without Testing - Vikrant Chauhan and Supriya Pawar 
YouTube: http://bitly.com/TEXL2u

- The Lean Game- Sneha Kadam
YouTubehttp://bitly.com/YtSzQO

- What's Accessibility - Vikrant Chauhan
YouTube: http://bitly.com/TtKBmC

Slides: http://bitly.com/Xd96JR
Firefox Add-ons Use for Software Testers - Sumit Singhal
YouTube: http://bitly.com/RKi0HZ

- Redefining Bugs! - Sneha Kadam
YouTube: http://bit.ly/UtGgyR

Closing note: Chaitanya Nadkarny
YouTube: http://bit.ly/SHxZd9

You can join the following groups on Facebook and LinkedIn to stay up-to-date with what’s happening in vodQA,updates, meeting other testing enthusiasts.

LinkedIn group: vodQA
Facebook group: vodQA

WAAT v1.5.0 released to rubygems.org

The newest version of WAAT (Web Analytics Automation Testing framework) for Java and Ruby is now available with a new plugin - JsSniffer.

Following the announcement of the new JsSniffer plugin for WAAT, I have now completed the testing for the same, and released the gem - WAAT-1.5.0.gem to rubygems.org.

Please take a look at the FAQs and the major changes on Ruby / major changes on Java section for some known issues, potential solutions for the same - as some of these changes could break your tests.

Tuesday, October 16, 2012

WAAT (Java & Ruby) with JS_SNIFFER is out of the box

I have pushed in the latest changes to WAAT to get over the limitation of not working in a pure https environment (http://essenceoftesting.blogspot.in/2011/06/waat-and-https.html).

The solution is creating a new type of plugin - called JS_SNIFFER.

This plugin requires the user of WAAT to do a little more work than before. 

They need (to work with their development team) to figure out what JS script they need to invoke in the browser to get the URL of interest that is sent as a pure https request over the wire. WAAT then takes this request, and does the tag matching for you.

This generation of the JS script is a one-time effort - unless the way the tags are reported changes in the product. Then the test framework can work in a seamless fashion as before to test this is working consistently in an automated fashion. 

Another advantage of this is that with this approach, we do not need to install jpcap or run the tests as a "super-user" - a restriction posed by the network packet capture library.

The WAAT_v1.5.0.jar is available on here (https://github.com/anandbagmar/WAAT/tree/master/dist) on github.

Similarly, I have also updated the WAAT-ruby gem (WAAT-1.5.0.gem). This gem is not yet pushed out to rubygems.org - as I am still testing it out. However, if you are interested, you can download it from here.

As usual, feedback / comments / suggestions most welcome!