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Posts Tagged ‘Functional testing’

Javascript + Selenium: The Rockstar Combination of Testing

July 25th, 2011 by Ashley Wilson

For our July Selenium meetup, held last Thursday, we wanted to give attendees something a little different to chew on. Thanks to our good friends at Yammer, who co-hosted the event with us, we did so not only with delicious catered Mexican food, but also plenty of Javascript & Selenium testing goodness to go around.

Bob Remeika, senior engineer at Yammer, gave a spirited presentation that left no one questioning his stance on testing (his opening slide – “Test your shit” – really said it all). He gave us an inside look at how Yammer tests using a combination of Jellyfish and Sauce OnDemand, and gave some great advice on knowing what and how to test when you’re just starting out.

We also had Adam Christian, Sauce Labs’ Javascript Aficionado and the creator of Jellyfish, give two talks. The first, a lightning talk titled “Javascript Via Selenium: The Good, The Bad, The Obvious”, covered some of the lesser known things about Javascript testing via Selenium.

The second showed off how you can use Jellyfish, the open source Javascript runner that he announced a few weeks ago, to run your JS unit tests in any environment.

Thanks to Adam, Bob, and Yammer for making this quite the fun and memorable meetup. As always, the San Francisco Selenium Meetup group is free to join & we meet monthly at different venues around the Bay Area to talk all things testing. See you in August!

Posted in Meetups, Sauce Offerings, Videos

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Sauce Builder Webinar: From zero to creating, storing and running automated tests in under 30 mins

May 3rd, 2011 by The Sauce Labs Team

As you may have heard, we recently released a new, free tool that makes building and running Selenium tests easier than before. Sauce Builder is now available for download, and with it comes the ability to create Selenium tests in your Firefox browser by simply clicking around your application. You can then run those tests in Sauce OnDemand with just a few clicks, no Selenium expertise necessary.

To explain more about Sauce Builder and how automated testing can accelerate your development velocity, we held a webinar with Adam Christian, a Sauce Labs developer and project lead for Sauce Builder.

With Sauce Builder, we’re hoping to simplify and improve the cross-browser testing process for development and QA teams. Specifically, Sauce Builder will allow you to:

Build Selenium tests with zero programming - Simply click through your application and Sauce Builder writes a Selenium scripts that reflect your actions.
Export results in the language of your choice - HTML, JAVA, Groovy, C#, Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby so your tests speak the same language as your application and dev team.
Eliminate bugs faster - Use immediate video playback of your tests in action, and share them with your teammates.
Remove test infrastructure headaches - Sauce Builder makes it a snap to either run tests locally in Firefox or in the cloud with access to all the browser / OS combinations supported in the super scalable Sauce OnDemand service.

Register To See The Webinar Now!

Posted in General, Sauce Offerings, Videos, Webinars

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Sauce Labs Eliminates Barrier to Automated Cross-Browser Testing with Sauce Builder

March 31st, 2011 by The Sauce Labs Team

New tool enables QA pros to build and run Selenium tests without Selenium expertise or infrastructure

SAN FRANCISCO, CA — (Mar. 31, 2011) – Sauce Labs, the web application testing company, today introduced Sauce Builder, a free testing tool that makes it easy for users to build Selenium tests without Selenium expertise and run them with the Sauce OnDemand service. Sauce Builder allows users to build automated Selenium tests simply by clicking through an application. By eliminating the complexity of hand-coding Selenium scripts, Sauce Builder accelerates the adoption of automated testing for QA and development teams that have been craving the development productivity Selenium offers. Sauce Builder is free and available for immediate download.

“Automated testing has historically been one of the most complicated, yet most valuable, technologies for companies that build software. Automated testing is doubly challenging because teams need to build and maintain a testing environment and on top of that, building tests can require significant technical skill,” said John Dunham, CEO of Sauce Labs. “We launched our Sauce OnDemand cloud service last year to eliminate the headache of maintaining a test infrastructure. Now with Builder, we’ve removed the next barrier to the adoption of automated testing and we’re very excited to see how this combination can help QA and development teams achieve their goals.”

With Sauce Builder, Sauce Labs continues to simplify and improve the cross-browser testing process for development and QA teams. Sauce Builder’s benefits include:

Build Selenium tests with zero programming – Simply click through your application and Sauce Builder writes a Selenium scripts that reflect your actions
Export results in the language of your choice – HTML, Java, Groovy, C#, Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby so your tests speak the same language as your application and dev team
Eliminate bugs faster – Use immediate video playback of your tests in action, and share them with your teammates
Remove test infrastructure headaches - Sauce Builder makes it a snap to either run tests locally in Firefox or in the cloud with access to all the browser / operating system combinations supported in the super scalable Sauce OnDemand service

With over four million downloads in just four years, the Selenium project is the world’s most popular functional testing framework for web applications. Designed to further expand Selenium adoption, Sauce Builder is the first web-based Selenium tool of its kind, including technology Sauce Labs acquired from Go Test It in 2010. After becoming more familiar with the technology post-acquisition, Sauce Labs elected to open source the code under the name “Se Builder” earlier this year because the technology held so much promise for the Selenium community.

Sauce Builder expands the capabilities of Se Builder by enabling users to directly access Sauce OnDemand, the cloud-based Selenium service, to run their tests. Sauce OnDemand is free to try for up to 200 testing minutes every month. Sauce Labs is also leading a collaborative effort with the Selenium community to deliver a new generalized plug-in architecture for Se Builder that among other things will support integrated plug-ins for testing services like Sauce OnDemand.

To learn more about how automated testing can accelerate your development velocity, please join Adam Christian,a Sauce Labs developer and project lead for Sauce Builder, on Tuesday, April 19^th at 10AM Pacific for the webinar, “From zero to creating, storing and running automated tests in under 30 minutes”.

“Debugging takes up valuable time that developers could be using to focus on their applications,” said Sauce Labs’ Christian. “Now with Sauce Builder, developers can leverage this great development environment through our cloud testing infrastructure and not worry about dealing with building or maintaining their own costly testing infrastructure.”
About Sauce Labs
Sauce Labs, web application testing company, provides Sauce OnDemand, a cloud based service that allows users to run automated cross-browser functional tests faster and eliminating the need to maintain their own test infrastructure. To date, over four million Sauce OnDemand tests have been run in the Sauce cloud. The lead investor of Sauce Labs is the Contrarian Group, Peter Ueberroth’s investment management firm. Sauce Labs is headquartered in San Francisco, California. For more information, visit http://saucelabs.com.

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Posted in Featured Posts, General, News, Sauce Offerings

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Selenium 2 Webinar: The Next Generation of Web and Mobile Application Testing

February 10th, 2011 by Ashley Wilson

Curious to know more about Selenium 2? Join Jason Huggins, creator of Selenium, for a webinar devoted to covering the essentials of this new testing tool that combines the best of WebDriver and Selenium.

Here’s a run-down of what you will learn next Wednesday, 2/16, at 10am PST:

iPhone and Android testing – See how Selenium 2 allows you to use built-in Android and iPhone emulators to test versions of your applications on the most popular mobile platforms.
Cleaner API for IDE users – Selenium introduces a simplified interface for IDE users that directs you to focus on only two basic objects to construct tests: WebDriver (browsers) and WebElements (anything on a web page). In Selenium 2, every API library is now tailored to each programming language for easier usability.
Enhanced scalability – The new Selenium 2 architecture allows developers and QA teams to “scale up and down”. For a single test on a local machine, you no longer need a background server. But when you want to scale up to run tests across multiple machines with multiple browser configurations, Selenium has all the power you’ll need.
Improved architecture – The new Selenium 2 architecture has enabled the introduction of a number of features that developers and QA pros will love, including native keyboard, support for mouse events, improved capabilities for handling pop-ups, and more stable browser control.

To join us, please click here to register. If you were wondering if Sauce Labs supports Selenium 2 testing the cloud, the answer is yes :-)

See you next week!

Posted in General, Webinars

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Advanced Selenium Synchronization with ‘Latches’

February 7th, 2011 by Adam Goucher

Synchronization with Selenium is the number two problem I see with people’s scripts (the first being broken locators). This is actually a pretty easy problem to solve in all but the most pathological situations.

Web 1.0
Remember the good ol’ days when clicking a link caused the browser to fetch a new page? Those were, and remain, super easy to synchronize with using waitForPageToLoad and its language specific variants. Here’s an example of this in Ruby:

@selenium.click "link=click here", :wait_for => :page

Web 2.0
But along came Web 2.0 and all its AJAX-y ‘goodness’. No longer could we be guaranteed that some action or event on the page would trigger a page load. For that, we needed to use a combination of isElementPresent or isVisible.

@selenium.click "link=click here", :wait_for => :element, :element => "my locator"
@selenium.click "link=click here", :wait_for => :visible, :element => "my locator"

While I haven’t done it yet for Ruby, I often combine the two together to create an ‘available’ condition to make sure that the element I care about is both present and visible. Something like this.

@selenium.click "link=click here", :wait_for => :available, :element => "my locator"

Post Web 2.0
Some AJAX calls affect multiple elements and are both tricky and/or time consuming to figure out all the places to watch. New technologies like COMET also make element availability more fallible than it might originally be. For these situations you need to use a ‘latch’ for synchronization.

A what?

The term ‘latch’ in this case is a value that is set in the browser’s DOM that your script monitors for synchronization rather than something in the actual page. And example is in order. Here is an AJAX call in Ruby on Rails.

<%= link_to_remote( "click here",
                   :update => "time_div",
                   :url => { :action => :say_when },
                   :before => "window.latch = 'started'",
                   :complete => "window.latch = 'done'") %>

What this will do is set window.latch to the string value ‘started’ in the DOM before it actually executes and will set it to ‘done’ after it is complete. No problem. People who work with AJAX are used to working with callbacks. The twist happened in our Selenium script.

@selenium.click "link=click here", :wait_for => :condition, :javascript => "window.latch == 'done'"

Now instead of checking for an element to be present or visible, we are waiting via waitForCondition for the latch conditions; in this case, ‘window.latch is done’.

I consider the latch technique as the synchronization method of last resort since it requires changing production code to support automation. But successful automation often calls for just that.

Posted in General, Selenium Knowledge

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Trends in Testing: Continuous Integration, Mobility, Open Source, Cloud

May 10th, 2010 by The Sauce Labs Team

Functional testing is the automation of web app testing across several platforms or browsers. In the past, functional testing was less common due to long development cycles and the lack of multiple browser options. It was done primarily in-house via proprietary software like Rational or QuickTestPro.

Today, there are four trends converging to radically change how organizations test web applications:

Continuous integration – An increased emphasis on performance of the software through the end customer’s perspective is leading agile development. Gartner predicts that by 2012 agile development methodologies will be used by 80 percent of all software development projects. Teams are shifting away from rigid quality control to quality that is demonstrable to the end user. With this shift, comes a need for quick, simple and automated testing tools.
Open source – Open source tools, like Selenium, are viable for functional testing. Today’s development environment has dramatically changed and a lot more people are contributing than ever before. The major advantages of open-source are speed, time to market, time to value, and the ability to reach and grow a developer and user community. In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2012, 80 percent of all commercial software will include elements of open source technology.
Cloud computing – Testing in the cloud is an affordable and scalable alternative to testing behind a firewall. It is expensive and time consuming to maintain on site test infrastructures that cover a vast number of browsers (and versions) of operating systems in several languages. The increase in the adoption of cloud computing creates an opportunity to leverage the space for functional testing. We believe the life cycle for cloud-based applications will look different in the future. New solutions that are cloud based will support cloud-base applications.
Mobility – Websites need to support multiple browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Rockmelt, Opera on various platforms including Windows and Mac. Smartphones only add to this “Browser War 2.0” battle with the plethora of mobile operating systems. These various environments make the infrastructure required more complex and the need for functional testing more relevant that ever before.

Are there other trends beyond continuous integration, mobility, open source and the cloud that will change how organizations test their web applications?

Posted in QA Trends / Sauce Labs' View of the World

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Highlights from our April 20th Selenium Testing Tools Demo Night

April 29th, 2010 by Ashley Wilson

Below are clips from our most recent Selenium meetup, which drew quite an enthusiastic crowd. Presenters Ray Vizzone of Test Labs, Inc and Matt Krapivner of Smart Pilot, David Vydra of Guideware, and Quality Tree founder Elisabeth Hendrickson were on hand at the Sauce Labs office to demonstrate leading edge tools / techniques that make functional testing easier and more effective. Also featured was a special Flex Pilot demo by Sauce Labs’ own Adam Christian.

Make sure to visit our #SFSE Meetup page here to RSVP for our next event on May 19, 2010 at Mozilla’s headquarters in Mountain View. Speakers from Mozilla and LinkedIn will discuss how they use Selenium and other open-source tools to handle quick and effective web testing. Take it from us – you don’t want to miss this!

Introduction to 4/20 Selenium Meetup with Stephen Donner of Mozilla