Contents tagged with testing
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User story is worthless, Behavior is what we need
User Story is suitable for describing what user needs but not what user does and how system reacts to user actions within different contexts. It basically gives product team a way to quantify their output and let their boss know that they are doing their job. As a developer, you can’t write code from user stories because you have no clue on what what is the sequence of user actions and system reactions, what are the validations, what APIs to call and so on. As a QA, you can’t test the software from user stories because it does not capture the context, the sequence of events, all possible system reactions. User stories add little value to dev lifecycle. It only helps product team understand how much work they have to do eventually and it helps finance team get a view on how much money people are talking about. But to UI designers, solution designers, developers, they are nothing but blobs of highly imprecise statements that leave room for hundreds of questions to be answered. The absence of “Context” and “Cause and Effect”, and the imprecise way of saying “As a...I want... so that...” leaves room for so many misinterpretations that there’s no way development team can produce software from just user stories without spending significant time all over again analysing the user stories. Software, and the universe eventually, is all about Cause and Effect. The Cause and Effect is not described in a user story.
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Step by Step screencasts to do Behavior Driven Development on WCF and UI using xUnit
I am trying to encourage my team to get into Behavior Driven Development (BDD). So, I made two quick video tutorials to show how BDD can be done from early requirement collection stage to late integration tests. It explains breaking user stories into behaviors, and then developers and test engineers taking the behavior specs and writing a WCF service and unit test for it, in parallel, and then eventually integrating the WCF service and doing the integration tests. It introduces how mocking is done using the Moq library. Moreover, it shows a way how you can write test once and do both unit and integration tests at the flip of a config setting.
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Rescue overdue offshore projects and convince management to use automated tests
I have published two articles on codeproject recently. One is a story where an offshore project was two months overdue, my friend who runs it was paying the team from his own pocket and he was drowning in ever increasing number of change requests and how we brainstormed together to come out of that situation.
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Unit Testing and Integration Testing in real projects
I am yet to find a proper sample on how to do realistic Test Driven Development (TDD) and how to write proper unit tests for complex business applications, that gives you enough confidence to stop doing manual tests anymore. Generally the samples show you how to test a Stack or a LinkedList, which is far simpler than testing a typical N-tier application, especially if you are using Entity Framework or Linq to SQL or some ORM in data access layer, and doing logging, validation, caching, error handling at middle tier. There are many articles, blog posts, video tutorials on how to write unit tests, which I believe are all very good starting points. But all these examples show you basic tests, not good enough to let your QA team go. So, let me try to show you some realistic unit and integration test examples which should help you write tests that gives you confidence and helps you gradually move towards TDD.
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ASP.NET AJAX testing made easy using Visual Studio 2008 Web Test
Visual Studio 2008 comes with rich Web Testing support, but it’s not rich enough to test highly dynamic AJAX websites where the page content is generated dynamically from database and the same page output changes very frequently based on some external data source e.g. RSS feed. Although you can use the Web Test Record feature to record some browser actions by running a real browser and then play it back. But if the page that you are testing changes everytime you visit the page, then your recorded tests no longer work as expected. The problem with recorded Web Test is that it stores the generated ASP.NET Control ID, Form field names inside the test. If the page is no longer producing the same ASP.NET Control ID or same Form fields, then the recorded test no longer works. A very simple example is in VS Web Test, you can say “click the button with ID ctrl00_UpdatePanel003_SubmitButton002”, but you cannot say “click the 2nd Submit button inside the third UpdatePanel”. Another key limitation is in Web Tests, you cannot address Controls using the Server side Control ID like “SubmitButton”. You have to always use the generated Client ID which is something weird like “ctrl_00_SomeControl001_SubmitButton”. Moreover, if you are making AJAX calls where certain call returns some JSON or updates some UpdatePanel and then based on the server returned response, you want to make further AJAX calls or post the refreshed UpdatePanel, then recorded tests don’t work properly. You *do* have the option to write the tests hand coded and write code to handle such scenario but it’s pretty difficult to write hand coded tests when you are using UpdatePanels because you have to keep track of the page viewstates, form hidden variables etc across async post backs. So, I have built a library that makes it significantly easier to test dynamic AJAX websites and UpdatePanel rich web pages. There are several ExtractionRule and ValidationRule available in the library which makes testing Cookies, Response Headers, JSON output, discovering all UpdatePanel in a page, finding controls in the response body, finding controls inside some UpdatePanel all very easy.