I was interviewed by Bob Payne when I was in Las Vegas speaking at Agile Development Practices earlier this year. You can listen to it here.
Agile Toolkit Podcast
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Category Archives: Cucumber
Watir Podcast Interview
I was interviewed by Dave McNulla for the Watir Podcast. You can listen to it here.
My book is finally out
I’m happy to announce that my book is finally available. I’m publishing it through LeanPub and the version that is released is a beta. This means that I will be publishing updates every few weeks until a the final book is complete.
You can get your copy on the LeanPub site. I hope you enjoy the book.
A Better Shovel
It has been a few months since I have posted anything on my blog and a lot of good things have happened. First of all, I have had 5 releases of the page-object gem since my last post. This post will explain one of the many new features added to page-object.
page-object 0.6.2 released
On February 12th I released a new version of my page-object gem. There are some very exciting features that have made it into page-object over the past few releases. I have been totally focused on finishing up my book and haven’t blogged for some time. This post is my attempt to showcase some of these new features.
Default Data Revisited
I just released a new version of the page-object gem today and it contains a nice new feature. This new feature will make it very easy to apply a set of data to a screen and have it populate all of the fields. This feature, when combined with a new gem I plan to announce soon, will allow for dynamic default data that can be used to drive a web application. This data can be managed within the pages or externally.
This post is an actual section from chapter 5 of my book. It introduces the concept of Default Data and also shows how to use this new feature.
Playing the waiting game
One difficulty testers run into when they are new to driving browsers with cucumber is knowing how to handle sites that contain a lot of ajax calls. They write scripts that assume the elements on the page exist and are shocked when the tests fails because it was trying to access something that wasn’t on the page yet.
In this post I’ll write a simple scenario that demos the async handling capabilities in the page-object gem. I’ll also briefly introduce you to a new gem that I use to generate my new projects. I’ll do all of this by writing a scenario that uses one of the examples google has provided to demo the GWT libraries. For those of you who have taken one of my classes you will already be familiar with this example but perhaps there are still a few things here for you to learn. Let’s get started writing the code!
Running your Cukes in Jenkins
One question that I am often asked is “How do you run your cucumber scripts?”. This question usually leads to a discussion about what process and software I use to run my features in a regression-like fashion in a team setting. The questioners are usually not interested in how a developer might use autotest (my local tool of choice) to run the cuke/spec loop. They’re not interested in how a developer might run a feature on their local machine to verify they have completed a card. They’re also not interested in how a developer or tester might run the entire suite of features to verify everything still works. They want to know how to schedule the execution of the entire suite of features.
The truth is that I don’t run them. Instead I have a server process run the features for me. I am a strong advocate of having the continuous integration server run the acceptance tests continuously. This post will explain how I do it and hopefully provide you the information you need to do it as well.
Those pesky frames and iframes
Wouldn’t it be sweet if all of the web pages in the world were nicely formed with easy to identify elements. If you work in an environment like this, I am envious. I often find myself working with a team where the sites are not pristine (I’m being nice here).
One thing I have found difficult to work with is pages that have frames and iframes. It gets worse when the elements you are trying to work with are nested within multiple frames/iframes. To address this complexity I decided to add simple frames handling to page-object.
Introducing page-object gem
page-object is a simple ruby gem that assists in creating flexible page objects for testing browser based applications. To understand the inspiration for this gem please read this blog post.
This post will walk you through some of the core features of the gem. Most of the materials in this post are also on the project wiki. Please refer to the wiki for updated documentation.