After reading many articles this week, I found one that poked my interest. It was an article about bash scripts. It was quite interesting because it was a tutorial on how you can use a bash script that will allow you to find all of the files that uses a particular method.

Karlo Smid shows us how you do it.

How it works

• Reads item from the txt.file
• Each row value is searched using grep utility
• Recursive search in all folders
• Outputs files that contains those searched items

Bash scripting is very useful because you can just tell the computer what to do automatically when you run it rather than having to do everything manually. When you run the script that you want, it improves time and also efficiency because it can do what you’re trying to do very quickly.

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From the blog CS@Worcester – My Blog by justcodeit94 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

I cannot stress how important it is to double check your work. During my last Software Quality Assurance and Testing class, we had the pleasure of doing a code review exercise. The tasks were to review code from a well known game called Sir Tommy Solitaire. It was a group exercise, but the day before class we were given the assignment to review the code and to try and find any faults within the program.

At first, I didn’t even look at the code, I just wanted to see how the program ran. By doing this, I had a glimpse about the coder and if he/she thought about user experience. I tried to type in random things just to see how the program would handle my inputs. After that I would make a note of what I thought wasn’t right and did the same when I looked at the code.

This in class experience was very insightful, because it shows you how to collaborate as team and shows you the importance of writing elegant, clean and efficient code. If you wrote a program and it works, but you did not document it at all, the program won’t be very good, because no one will know what your methods do, or why you have a certain class or named a variable the way you did, because there is no documentation. Documentation is very imperative in the programming realm, because there are different styles of code, and documenting things makes it easier for other developers to know what you are doing.

From the blog CS@Worcester – My Blog by justcodeit94 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Karlo Smid wrote an interesting piece on the value of UI automation testing.

Lets begin by defining what UI automation testing is. According to Microsoft,

Automated tests that drive your application through its user interface (UI) are known as coded UI tests (CUITs). These tests include functional testing of the UI controls. They let you verify that the whole application, including its user interface, is functioning correctly. Coded UI Tests are particularly useful where there is validation or other logic in the user interface, for example in a web page. They are also frequently used to automate an existing manual test.

So what are the values of UI Automation Tests?

• They represent executable documentation for your product.
• Assist in answering questions about complicated business scenarios.

Requirements for Good UI Testing?

• Language that enables you to write less code.
  • Example: Ruby
• Page object pattern implementation
• The use of Jenkins which is an integration tool
• The use of rspec for the testing framework
• Smart regression testing

From the blog CS@Worcester – My Blog by justcodeit94 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

While looking through my reader feed, I found many interesting articles, but this one stuck out to me the most. The reason to this is due to the fact that I’m a firm believer of strong writing skills especially in the field of computer science.

In a very informative article written by Renuka Kant, touches on how to improve your writing skills as a software tester. In this article, the author listed out 9 ways to improve your writing skills.

Lets begin

1. What is the purpose on what you are writing
2. Be aware of your audience
3. Read
4. Formatting your work
5. Keep it simple
6. Know when to use an active or passive voice in your writing
7. Make sure you check grammar
8. Review and edit
9. PRACTICE

From the blog CS@Worcester – My Blog by justcodeit94 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

What is DevOps?

According to Moin Syed Principal Consultant, Advisory & Transformation Services at Cigniti Inc. states that

DevOps is a culture that enables seamless coordination among the different stakeholders in the software chain. DevOps brings together the two critical silos of software process namely, development & operations to integrate within the same software cycle.

DevOps drives all the IT stakeholders to collaborate to deliver value faster. For this it collates the practices of continuous integration, continuous testing, continuous deployment and continuous monitoring.

Testing is imperative for the successful outcome of DevOps. These testers recommends that testing should be done early and constantly

Tips for successful DevOps Testing

1.) Involve development team during test design.

2.) Identify the critical test cases and prepare the test suite to test the functionality of the required build.

3.) Keep the test execution cycles short and quick.

4.) Implement code analysis and coverage tools to ensure 100% code coverage.

5.) Encourage parallel execution of tests to help reduce time for go live which is the heart of a successful DevOps implementation.

In conclusion, DevOps brings together developers and operations so that they can work together on becoming successful. Before, the goal of developers was to create new features for lets say a web page. The operations crew frowns upon this, because their job is to keep the site up and running. In order to add new features, the site must be taken down in order to add those new features to the web page.

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From the blog CS@Worcester – My Blog by justcodeit94 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Joel Montvelisky wrote an interesting piece on the art of transforming testing data into project information. In his article he showed different examples of test execution reports and explained why report B was better than report A. He noted that when you work with people outside of your testing team, you must also think like them, understand the information they need and how to to display it in a way that they will grasp the content faster and better. 

Here are some examples of test execution reports:

Team A’s Report:
Total Tests in Cycle: 376 
Passed Tests: 301
Failed Tests: 28 
Tests not Run: 57

Team B’s Report:
Tests in Cycle: 376
Execution percentage: 87.5%
Passed percentage: 80%

Which report is better?

While both reports are providing the same data, report B supplies the readers with better information. The advantage that report B has on report A is that it shows the percentages in their report. This is an advantage because people don’t like doing math equations in their heads, when they can just read it like in Team B’s report.  The less people need to think, the more brilliant your report will appear to the intended audience.

Key tips for test execution reports

• Show data in percentages or rates
• Use graphs
• Don’t pollute the report with useless data
• Anticipate questions
• Report should speak for itself. Less explanations = good report.

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From the blog CS@Worcester – My Blog by justcodeit94 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.