Thursday, July 16, 2015

Automating Look & Feel, along with Functional validation

Typically we automate the validation of functionalities - using various options and approaches based on the Test Automation Pyramid. However, there are various reasons why one may want to automate the Look & Feel of their application (web / native)

This post is not about if or when we should automate the Look & Feel aspects of the product. This post assumes you have done the discussions, evaluations and validations required to reach the decision that, yes, we need to automate the Look & Feel of the product under test. 

The next question is - how? What are the alternatives of accomplishing this type of automation?

If you need basic validation, there is an open-source alternative - where you can do Visual Testing and Validations using PhantomCss. Vishnu & Shridhar spoke about this in vodQA Pune - Innovations in Testing. See the slides and videos from their awesome session.

If you need more flexibility and functionality from the Look & Feel automation, and want to do this for cross-browser / multiple devices, then I recommend you look at Applitools Eyes product. I had have seen a couple of demos from Moshe and Adam about this product - and they were kind to record one of the demos and allow me to share it with all - you can see the demo here on youtube.



Applitools has a free account for individuals, with of course, certain limitation in usage (not functionality). You can sign-up for your account here and try it out.

Tuesday, July 14, 2015

Client-side Performance Testing Workshop in TechJam, 13th August 2015

I am conducting a Client-side Performance Testing workshop in TechJam on Thursday, 13th August 2015.

You can register for the same from the TechJam page.


Abstract

In this workshop, we will see the different dimensions of Performance Testing and Performance Engineering, and focus on Client-side Performance Testing.
Before we get to doing some Client-side Performance Testing activities, we will first understand how to look at client-side performance, and putting that in the context of the product under test. We will see, using a case study, the impact of caching on performance, the good & the bad! We will then experiment with some tools like WebPageTest and Page Speed to understand how to measure client-side performance.
Lastly - just understanding the performance of the product is not sufficient. We will look at how to automate the testing for this activity - using WebPageTest (private instance setup), and experiment with yslow - as a low-cost, programmatic alternative to WebPageTest.

Expected Learnings

  1. What is Performance Testing and Performance Engineering.
  2. Hand's on experience of some open-source tools to monitor, measure and automate Client-side Performance Testing.
  3. Examples / code walk-through of some ways to automate Client-side Performance Testing.

Prerequisites

  1. Participants are required to bring their own laptop for this workshop.
  2. Also, please install phantomJS on your machine (http://phantomjs.org/download.html)