Category Archives: CS443

Test Automation

Article link: https://dzone.com/articles/starting-automation-testing-from-scratch-here-is-w

Throughout this semester we have learned about how to create tests in a mostly “manual” way, today I want to explore an article that serves as an introduction and overall guide to automation testing. I especially wanted to learn about this topic since it has repeatedly come up in other articles I’ve read on this website.

Overall, I found the content of this article to be great and I think it thoroughly covers every aspect I can think of, and acts as a great beginner’s guide to this topic of automation testing. The author methodically covers everything on automation testing from the benefits of switching, to figuring out which areas of your testing should be automated.

Looking at the section of this article that lists the different areas automation testing can help is particularly interesting to me as most of the types of testing here I am unfamiliar with (and aren’t covered by our testing course) but would like to know more about. This includes areas such as regression testing, which I just learned about, and performance testing. From this article it seems that automation testing seems to help particularly with cross-browser testing. This made me think about how different web browsers are tested which is something I have only done by manually checking that the application functions properly by going through the program as a user. In retrospective it makes sense that some automated tool can make this much easier and I would like to see how this works more.

I think one of the most important points the author makes (and states many times) is “do not aim for a 100% automation”, which makes sense as the author explains how it is not necessarily feasible or beneficial to have all of your tests automated. Furthering this point, the other interesting part of this article is how the author explains that manually testing is better for certain aspects of software. After reading these reasons, I completely agree with the author that certain areas such as testing the actual user experience of a program makes more sense to test manually instead of automating. Another aspect I really like about this article that I like is that the author continues throughout the article to focus on the practicality of automating testing from a business standpoint and takes into account the amount of investment and return on investment that can be gained by automated testing.

This article has certainly made me more interested in testing automation and I would like to see how tools implement this, especially in areas the article says can really benefit from this such as regression or browser testing.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Chris' Computer Science Blog by cradkowski and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

A Retrospective and Review of Unit Testing

Article link: https://dzone.com/articles/why-do-programmers-fail-to-write-good-unit-tests

In this blog post I wanted to examine an article I found about unit testing. I think that since unit tests were one of the first types of testing we learned about and we have used unit tests as a foundation for many other testing methods this semester, reviewing this article serves as a great retrospective (and provides another viewpoint) on the importance of unit testing and defining criteria on writing “good” unit tests.

In the article, the author defines the significance of unit tests in creating software. They then go on to define some various qualities that make for a “good” unit test. I agree with the listed points, but I think this article could benefit by providing a few examples of good unit tests and maybe a few bad ones for comparison, especially since this is an article about programmers not correctly writing unit tests. I also think the article could better define what these “units” that are being tested are, since this term is used frequently throughout the article. Additionally, I think the article should better define what specifically is being tested in these “units” besides just saying “examine and test each unit of code separately”. Again, this is where some examples would greatly help illustrate the author’s point. The article then goes to list many benefits of writing unit tests. It ends with an interesting (and great) point of how just having unit tests isn’t necessarily beneficial (and can even be detrimental) if they are poorly written.

Overall, I think that after learning about and using unit tests a lot this semester, that this article can serve as a good introduction to the topic, and it certainly reaffirms what I have learned about unit testing, but I also think it requires some revisions to be more helpful in demonstrating the points it makes, as I find it to be somewhat vague in the fundamental parts of presenting the main concept of unit testing. I think that having a well written article about this topic is especially important as this type of testing is used as the basis for many other types of testing we have learned about. I also think that this article could include this point of how unit testing is used in the larger contexts of other types of testing such as ensuring code coverage to further prove its importance.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Chris' Computer Science Blog by cradkowski and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Regression Testing

Article link: https://dzone.com/articles/what-is-regression-testing-and-why-is-it-important

Today I learned about regression testing from an excellent article on DZone and why it is an essential part of software testing. As the article explains, regression testing involves testing the whole software product to ensure that any changes to the code doesn’t break what was already working in the product or other parts of the software. The article then goes through a great example of how fixing a bug in one part of an example piece of software can unintentionally result in another (previously working) part of the system to stop working properly. The article demonstrates really well that this breakage can occur despite unit tests showing that the bug was fixed properly. This to me is an especially important point as it shows the value in using multiple methods of testing to ensure software is performing correctly. One criticism I do have of this article is that I wish they gave an example of how to implement regression (the article does include a link to a tool that performs regression testing) testing in an actual program (or in context of their previous example).

Although after reading this article, the concept of regression testing seems simple, I find it very important as both a software user and software developer. In my personal experience as a user I have seen everything from operating systems to video games release updates that caused features that worked fine previously to become buggy or stop working entirely. From the user perspective I know how frustrating this can be, so I am glad that I learned how to prevent this problem as a software developer. Regression testing is definitely something I now want to implement into my personal software projects. Now I need to look into the tools that can help do this.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Chris' Computer Science Blog by cradkowski and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Technical Review

The school semester is almost over and slowly everything is coming to a completion. This will be my last post for the Testing Class, Over the course of it I have learned quite a lot of valuable skills in the Computer Science field.

The last covered topic of the class was the Technical Review, maybe not as advanced as previous exercises this one let us practice probably one of the most important and widely used techniques, the Technical Review, or simply code review. Some info about that can be found here. This is a form of static white-box testing technique which is conducted to spot the defects early in the life cycle that cannot be detected by black box testing techniques. It should not be lead by a person who wrote the code, or at least one member of the review has to be a somebody not associated with the code.

This is a very good and very easy form of troubleshooting and detecting bugs early in the production, and it should be used as soon as possible after the implementation of the code .

From the blog #CS@Worcester – Pawel’s CS Experience by Pawel Stypulkowski and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Testing with MOCKING

Having learned about mocking it was finally time to put it to test. We were given some code and exercises to work with and learn by practice, I love that by the way, POGIL is awesome. We were given a Mocking Framework called Mockito to use and it seems like it is a very useful tool for testing.
I am still a little bit confused about Mockito and its use (practical side) but that is fine, there is plenty of knowledge base right on their own website here. Yes their logo is a Mojito…. I have read few things and it helped me to better understand the framework, the website also has links to FAQ and blogs by the creators. I believe anybody will be able to work with Mockito after doing some reading and maybe some practice.

From the blog #CS@Worcester – Pawel’s CS Experience by Pawel Stypulkowski and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

First STUBS now others…

Last time I have learned abut Stubs in programming, this time I came to find out that there is more to it then I thought. For the Testing class we had to read this article by Martin Fowler and learn about apparently different kinds of Stubs, but Mocks are not Stubs…..

The article is a little bit lengthy but it is a good source of information if you want to, or have to learn more about testing, it also had a plenty of examples and explanations how the differences between stubs and mocks and dummies and fakes look like. When it comes down to it remembering these definitions from Fowler is the minimum of work:

  • Dummy objects are passed around but never actually used. Usually they are just used to fill parameter lists.
  • Fake objects actually have working implementations, but usually take some shortcut which makes them not suitable for production (an in memory database is a good example).
  • Stubs provide canned answers to calls made during the test, usually not responding at all to anything outside what’s programmed in for the test.
  • Spies are stubs that also record some information based on how they were called. One form of this might be an email service that records how many messages it was sent.
  • Mocks are what we are talking about here: objects pre-programmed with expectations which form a specification of the calls they are expected to receive.

From the blog #CS@Worcester – Pawel’s CS Experience by Pawel Stypulkowski and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Stubs

When it comes to testing software I am definitely all for it but at the same time I am for it by doing it the “old school” way. Even at work this mentality stands, but recently the more I learn about testing the more I understand the need for it.

Having learned more about the subject of testing I feel like I can talk a little bit about it. Stubs is the part I been educated on recently and it is a bit confusing but that will probably go away with time and practice. Anyway Stubs. Those in programming are (according to Wikipedia): a piece of code used to stand in for some other programming functionality. A stub may be a temporary substitute for yet-to-be-developed code. I do know how to use those but until now I didn’t know what they are called and that is cool in its own way. Everybody knows how to use some fake code that is there just to run something for a time or to fool rest of the code into working. Now you know what to call it to. A STUB!!!

From the blog #CS@Worcester – Pawel’s CS Experience by Pawel Stypulkowski and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Displaying JUnit Test Reports on GitLab

In this blog post I wanted to look at something interesting that I found a while back this semester when we were learning about JUnit testing and combining this with GitLab. In class we learned how to use Gradle to build our Java programs and to run JUnit tests and get GitLab to run them when we pushed our code to GitLab using GitLab’s continuous integration feature. As GitLab’s documentation says, using Gradle and JUnit on Gitlab will show whether the tests fail on GitLab, but I wanted to take this a step further and looked into seeing if it was possible to display more information about JUnit test statuses on GitLab itself. This led me to finding this article in GitLab’s documentation about a feature in GitLab that can display JUnit test reports on merge requests. As this documentation shows this can easily be enabled on any GitLab project that already is a Java project with GitLab’s CI using Gradle to run JUnit tests. All you need to do is add the necessary lines in the GitLab CI/CD config file provided in this document to display the tests reports in a merge request.

I already tried this before a couple of months ago when I first found it, but I wanted a nice demonstration of this feature, so I created a little Java test program that has a basic Student class with a JUnit test class. I then converted this to a Gradle project using some previous programs we have used as examples and instructions provided from this class and then pushed this to a new GitLab project. On the master branch of this project the tests pass as indicated by the previous GitLab CI job. After getting the initial code pushed and passing the tests, I then created a testing branch where I changed the code in the Student class so that one of the tests (testSetLastName) would deliberately fail. Creating a merge request on GitLab for this branch and pushing this “broken” code results in the test failing when it runs on GitLab with Gradle and therefore GitLab displays on the merge request which JUnit test(s) failed:

blog-post-1-screenshot.PNG

I found this little feature to be pretty awesome in combining software testing along with software management tools and can easily see how this would be very useful for checking if new or modified code in a project causes tests to fail. In addition to checking if the tests pass, this feature allows us to easily see which tests fail, and directly on the merge request itself, instead of the alternative that the documentation says of looking through reports possibly containing thousands of lines for the failed test. I will definitely be implementing this on any projects I’m working on that use JUnit tests and are hosted on GitLab.

Link to article: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/junit_test_reports.html

Link to demo program: https://gitlab.com/cradkowski/gitlab-junit-test-reports-demo

From the blog CS@Worcester – Chris' Computer Science Blog by cradkowski and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Testing, Testing and some more Testing

In my Testing class we are constantly learning some new techniques and ways to test software, although there is some hands on testing on actual code a lot of it is more theoretical or to be more specific it is describing how we can test. It is all useful I know it but as a CS major I do want to write code if possible, less theory please, more practice. End of rant? Maybe for now.

This week was about Define-Use Testing. It is somewhat simple concept and I am glad that I can learn about it. It showed us some of the ways that today’s compilers work and make comparisons to display errors in the code. The whole concept of Define-Use testing is all about visual inspection and checking of the code. This will be some useful information for certain aspects of Computer Science field.

From the blog #CS@Worcester – Pawel’s CS Experience by Pawel Stypulkowski and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Learning with POGIL

This is going to be my second semester with POGIL (Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning) style classes and I have to admit I am a fan. The classes are a lot more involved for students and in my opinion it makes it a lot more interesting and helps with retaining information about topics.

From the blog #CS@Worcester – Pawel’s CS Experience by Pawel Stypulkowski and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.