Automated Functional Testing By Bhrigu Malhotra ( http://www.qacampus.com )
First of all let me make you all aware that I’m a developer and what you are going to read further is a developer’s account, so it may sound to you like a layman tester. But what I’m going to share is something which has been very helpful to me to ‘functionally’ test the web application our team has been building and I thought this may help you as well. So even if you are a tester, try to think the way developer’s think for some time, I’m sure this would be useful to you too. Before I go ahead, I think we all understand that Functional Testing is testing the functionality of our application which means you’d probably be going through a login using some credentials, clicking some links, verifying some outputs - in simplest terms. Now just give it a thought that if you can automate these i.e. invest some time for once and then while you are sipping a cup of coffee, someone is testing what you coded. Change your code 10 times and run your test 10 times to ensure nothing breaks, so easy. Not just this if you have continuous integration server setup which runs your tests, you’d come to know immediately if and when someone else broke your code. Believe me ones who have used it, feel it is fantastic. There are a variety of tools available for this over internet each with pros/cons but I’m going to share some info here about one which I liked very much and have been using for a while now. I’d also share why I preferred it over others. Ok, no longer prolonging the suspense the tool I’m talking about is called Canoo WebTest (webtest.canoo.com) which is a free Open Source tool for automated testing of web applications in a very effective way. The primary reason why I liked it is that it is FAST; very fast … most of the test cases that I’ve written are executed in less than a minute and that too over remote applications deployed on servers on the other side of globe. Second reason for liking it so much is the ease of writing; very quickly you can build up your tests. Though they have released a WebTest recorder plug-in which when installed in Mozilla Firefox can record the script for you, but believe me the more you start writing there test cases, the less reliant you will become on the recorder. Third thing is these tests do not use a browser so that completely eliminated browser-specific issues which some tools are plagued with. Now some things about WebTest which some people don’t like is you actually do not see the tests being executed i.e. loading of a browser window, automatic clicking on buttons and errors on the screen (if any). But that I feel that it is so by design …. Doing all this takes time and then browser issues too creep in, so I’m happy like this way only. I agree they can improve on reporting of errors but again the objective of this tool is to test and just to test, if you want to report issues manual intervention is needed. At last I’ll just say go give it a try, I’m sure once past initial hiccups, you’ll start liking it the way I am.
