vodQA Pune - Less Talk, Only Action - Agenda, Abstract and workshop pre-requisites

vodQA-Pune - Less Talk, Only Action!

When? - Saturday, 27th Aug 2016, 8.30am - 5.30pm

Where? 

ThoughtWorks, Pune 
6th Floor, Binarius Building, 
Beside Sales Tax Office, Shastrinagar, Yerawada 
Pune, Maharashtra 411006 

Map: http://goo.gl/maps/KfuJG

What?

vodQA Pune - Less Talk, Only Action! 
- Registration - 8.30am- 9.15am
- Welcome note - 9.15am

Agenda

Abstracts

1. Automating Web Analytics - Why? How?

Do you know –

• What is Web Analytics?

• How does Web Analytics work?

• Why is it important? How to test Web Analytics?

• How can we ensure correct data is sent to the Web Analytics server, every time, for all the actions?

Attend this workshop to learn ‘What is Web Analytics?’ and why it is an extremely important aspect of Software Development & Testing for your product / service to succeed!

We will share some techniques for testing Web Analytics - in a non-automated way - and why that is very challenging and error-prone.

We will learn, via hands-on activity, about WAAT - Web Analytics Automation Testing Framework (https://essenceoftesting.blogspot.com/search/label/waat) - an open-source solution, to automate validation of correct information / tags being sent to the Web Analytic server for different user actions as part of your regular Selenium-WebDriver Test Automation Framework.

Lastly, we will see how the impact of Analytics has changed dramatically with more adoption and spread of IoT (Internet of Things) and Big Data, and what we need to do to be part of the change, if not influencers of change!

Pre-Reqs:

• JDK 1.8
• IDE (Eclipse / IntelliJ Idea / etc.)
• Git
• Firefox browser compatible with Selenium v2.53.1 (v46)
• Also refer here for steps to run Appium tests using WAAT

2. Performance testing with Gatling for Beginners

Gatling is a server side performance testing tool. This workshop aims at giving introduction to Gatling and facilitating participants to write their first performance tests using Gatling.

> Brief intro to Gatling

> Using Postman to check stub server(created using mountebank for workshop)

> Write a sample test using gatling (pre set up machines are provided)

Pre-Reqs:

• Participants should know at least one programming language well (Gatling tests are written in Scala. But participants need not know Scala)
• Prior knowledge of what 'Performance testing is?' would help.

System requirements:

• Homebrew (Package Manager for Mac)
• Java 8
• Gradle
• Intellij IDE(Add Scala plug in)

3. Game of Test Automation

We are going to use a game to work out the WHY, WHAT and HOW of test automation within the context of consumers, application, skillset, mindset, etc.

Pre-Reqs: None

4. Security Testing - Operation Vijay

It is now the days of the web. All businesses move their applications online for their customers to use.

Many of these applications contain critical data of the customers such as credit card details, their personal details and so on. These data are very valuable. If these data fall in the wrong hands, they can have disastrous consequences.

Attacks on these systems can destroy the trust that the customers have for the business, they can cause great losses to the customers as well as the business, and so on.

The motivation behind attacks could be different like earning money, earning popularity, destroying a competitor company, etc.

No matter what the intention of the attack is, we need to develop safe applications and we need to know the various vulnerabilities and the consequences of our decisions when we develop applications.

Similarly, we should be aware of the various vulnerabilities before we test the applications so that we can try and exploit it during the testing phase and ensure better quality and safer applications.

Pre-Reqs:

• Java
• Modern Browser like Firefox/Chrome

5. Automate your Mobile tests with Appium

Introduction to Appium.

Appium design for Android and iOS

How to locate elements on android and iOS applications(Inspector).

Hands-on code snippet for android and iOS(Wordpress as sample app)

Generating reports (ExtentReports)

Evolve code snippet written above into a Page Object Framework.

Pre-Reqs:

• IntelliJ
• Java 1.8
• MAVEN
• Node
• Adb - android debug bridge
• Appium installed through node(npm install -g appium). Once the installation goes well. Hit command “appium” without quote and you should see Welcome message from appium.
• Download & install Virtual Box from here
• Download the basic version on Genymotion Android Emulator from here
• Make sure you chose the basic version which is free for use(Go to individual tab).
• You will be asked to create account with Genymotion before downloading the Genymotion package/installer
• Confirm your account by pressing the link sent to your registered email id
• Once you download, install Genymotion Android Emulator by following the instructions here
• Once you install, open/start Genymotion and click on Add(+) link to add a new virtual device and press Signin and login
• Select Android Version 6.0.0 and Device model Google Nexus 5 or 6. For more details follow the instruction mentioned here
• Select from available option, Press Next and wait till download finishes.
• Press start button & you should see emulator running.

6. Increase Automation to REST

What are web services and why we use them?

How to test a web service in multiple ways?

Increased familiarity with automation

Tools used : rest client, postman (mention alternatives), unirest JAVA and requests python

Pre-Reqs:

• IntelliJ
• MAVEN
• CHROME and POSTMAN

7. Let's cook Cucumber

In this workshop we will be covering:

• Advantages of BDD through cucumber example.
• Framework setup along with JAVA and Selenium.
• Writing one end to end test case in real world.
• If time permits - will be covering basic Refactoring

Pre-Reqs:

• IntelliJ
• Java 1.8
• Maven
• Firefox 46

8. Mobile Automation using Espresso

Pre-Reqs:

• Ensure you have Java 7 or beyond, installed on your box. If not you can download it from here 
• Download & install Virtual Box from here
• Download and install Android Studio from here. 
• Also kindly download the android command line tools from the above link.
• If you open android studio, it will ask you download & setup Android API and build tools which is useful for debug & compile our apps so please follow the steps. Ensure you have following things installed before you come for workshop and downloading it takes lot of time. 
  • Android SDK build-tools v23.0
  • Android API 5.0 or above
  • Install Android Support library from Extras. 
  • Please google in case of any issues while installing SDK
• Download the basic version on Genymotion Android Emulator from here
  • Make sure you chose the basic version which is free for use(Go to individual tab).
  • You will be asked to create account with Genymotion before downloading the Genymotion package/installer
  • Confirm your account by pressing the link sent to your registered email id
  • Once you download, install Genymotion Android Emulator by following the instructions here
  • Once you install, open/start Genymotion and click on Add(+) link to add a new virtual device and press Signin and login 
  • Select Android Version 6.0.0 and Device model Google Nexus 5 or 6. For more details follow the instruction mentioned here
  • Select from available option, Press Next and wait till download finishes.
  • Press start button & you should see emulator running.
  • You’re all set for the event. 

Agenda published for vodQA Pune - Less Talk, Only Action!

The agenda for the upcoming vodQA Pune - Less Talk, Only Action! is now published.


NOTE: For this event, we will require the participants to get their laptops (and chargers).

When? 

Saturday, 27th Aug 2016, 8.30am - 5.30pm

Where? 

ThoughtWorks, Pune 
6th Floor, Binarius Building, 
Beside Sales Tax Office, Shastrinagar, Yerawada 
Pune, Maharashtra 411006 

Map: 

http://goo.gl/maps/KfuJG

What?

vodQA Pune - Less Talk, Only Action! 
- Registration - 8.30am- 9.15am
- Welcome note - 9.15am

Topics covered: 

This vodQA will focus on hands-on activities. We are setting up a bunch of workshops for participants, please keep a watch for details and pre-requisites required for the workshops.

We will publish the agenda very soon in vodQA groups on 
Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/groups/vodqa/) and 
LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/groups/4281359)

NOTE: For this event, we will require the participants to get their laptops (and chargers).

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

vodQA Pune - Less Talk, Only Action!

Very happy to announce the next edition of vodQA - 'Less Talk, Only Action!' with focus on hands-on activities. 

You are required to register & submit for this vodQA edition by filling in the below google form - https://goo.gl/forms/We3002DOlkQXmPsN2

There are limited seats for the workshops, available on first-come-first-served basis. 

NOTE: For this event, we will require the participants to get their laptops (and chargers).

When? 

Saturday, 27th Aug 2016, 8.30am - 5.30pm

Where? 

ThoughtWorks, Pune 
6th Floor, Binarius Building, 
Beside Sales Tax Office, Shastrinagar, Yerawada 
Pune, Maharashtra 411006 

Map: 

http://goo.gl/maps/KfuJG

What?

vodQA Pune - Less Talk, Only Action! 
- Registration - 8.30am- 9.15am
- Welcome note - 9.15am

Topics covered: 

This vodQA will focus on hands-on activities. We are setting up a bunch of workshops for participants, please keep a watch for details and pre-requisites required for the workshops.

We will publish the agenda very soon in vodQA groups on 
Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/groups/vodqa/) and 
LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/groups/4281359)

NOTE: For this event, we will require the participants to get their laptops (and chargers).

Agenda will be published soon.

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 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)

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

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

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!

Pictures

Feedback

My Takeaway & Learning

- The attendees did not have much exposure to Web Analytics, and how it works. I should spend more time in speaking about that

- I should spend more time in challenges and potential solutions related to Big Data & IoT

- A lot of people are interested in WAAT - that could be a separate, more detailed discussion

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