Today I’ve discovered the amazing world of browser testing.

I’ve been learning about tools lately in our final classes, such as Pit Testing. But using an already existing tool, a web browser, to automate tests, was a really cool discovery.

Over on Awesome Testing’s blog, they have many posts talking about Selenium, which made me finally look it up. On the home page of Selenium, they proudly proclaim, “Selenium automates browsers. That’s it!” They know how amazing just that is. By automating a web browser, the capabilities are nearly limitless. You can distribute scripts across many environments. Create bug reproductions scripts, and scripts to aid in automated exploratory testing.

By using versatile and common tools such as web browsers, including the most popular ones like Chrome and Firefox, one can test all manner of things. Browsers can read html, styling elements, javascript, and AJAX. They can gain incredible amounts of information and interact with web pages in ways that with just a small amount of automation can test almost everything about a web page and thus web sites. As browsers also have the ability to view certain files such .pdf files, this increases their ability to test.

The possibilities with Selenium are really wonderful to think about. But the post by Awesome testing today is talking specifically about headless browser testing.

What’s a headless browser? Simply a browser without a Graphic User Interface. So instead one uses a command line like interface or network interface. This is helpful for Continuous Integration in that a display might not always be available. Unix systems, for example, don’t have display outputs on by default. In which case, headless browsers allow us to test them instead of using combinations of other tools to do the same job.

By combining Selenium and a headless browser we can do headless browser testing on servers and web sites. It’s so simple, and also so interesting. This gave me a glimpse of the way professional testers combine multiple tools along with coding, most of the article is dedicated to showcasing java code for headless browser testing in Firefox, to create their own toolbox of software for making sure things work. It also showed a concrete example a testing method used in Continuous Integration, which was nice. I was also introduced to a very exciting new tool, Selenium. Having a new toy to play with is always exciting though.

Original post: http://www.awesome-testing.com/2017/09/firefox-selenium-browser-capabilities.html

From the blog CS@Worcester – Fu's Faulty Functions by fymeri and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

For my last blog of the semester i chose a blog on using penetration tests to strengthen cyber security, the article can be found here. In today’s time cyber attacks are becoming more and more common , and they can affect anyone from an individual to a large corporation. In the last few years alone we have seen a large number of corporations that have had to deal with large scale data leaks. Some of the ways that companies prepare for these attacks is by using vulnerability assessment, Penetration (or Pen) Testing, Security scanning, Risk Assessment, and Ethical Hacking in order to make there system more secure. In this article we are going to be focusing on Penetration Testing.

What is penetrations testing?well in this blog penetration testing is defined as follows:  a sanctioned triggered attack that is conducted on a computer system to assess security flaws, which can otherwise result in a data breach or intrusion within the system. Basically you implement a cyber security attack yourself in hopes of finding insecurity’s that might one day be exploited in a real cyber attack. This can be done both by manual testing or automated testing , and is also referred to as a white hat hack.

penetration testing can be broken down into a few different subcategories. First up we have targeted testing , which is done by the systems IT team and is witnessed by all in the system. Next up we have External testing which tests all the organizations servers that are external facing such as web servers , domain names, and firewalls. This type of testing is to see what kind of damage can be done to the system from the outside. The next type of penetration testing is internal testing , which tests what kind of damage can be done from inside the system with authorized access. The final type of testing is call blind testing and this is testing where the attacking team only has limited information to use for the attack , and this is supposed to simulate a real life attack where anything could happen.

“Gartner in its report mentions that by 2020, 40 percent of all managed security service (MSS) contracts will be bundled with other security services and broader IT outsourcing (ITO) projects, up from 20 percent today. ” As we can see the security field is growing greatly today as the threat of cyber attacks also increases. One way to combat this is with the use of penetration testing. Cyber security can be very expensive so it is important for a company to be able to use penetration tests to figure out where they should be putting there money.

In conclusion, i picked this article because it is a type of testing that i had not seen too much of through out the semester and so it peaked my interest. The thing i found the most interesting about the article is how similar this type of testing is to regular testing. Even though you are testing the security of a system , the testing is done much in the same way , by testing all the different boundaries of the system. Automation can help with this but manual testing is always needed to accompany it. For manual testing security ,many of the different testing options we have discussed would also work here like boundary value testing and edge testing. While viewing many different types of testing this semester, i noticed that they all share a lot of similarities, and they all seem to be made up of some combination of the types of testing we have learned this semester. I have build a solid testing foundation this semester which will allow me to continue learning in the field of testing as i move forward.

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

So for this week I have decided to read “Inversion of Control- An Introduction with Examples in .NET” from the joelabrahamsson website. The reason I chose this article is because with the subject of automatic testing, Inversion of Control and Dependency Injection is what I do not get mostly. It is usually a topic that I do not hear that much, so I believe this will help in understanding on the purpose of using both principles.

This article basically by the title goes over Inversion of Control from the definition to the ways of using it. So Inversion of Control is essentially a way to the invert the flow of control in comparison to procedural programming. It means that every module can focus on what is it designed for and ensures clarity with little complications. The benefits in using Inversion of Control is that when changing the interface of a particular class uses in runtime, that class can no longer be dependent on another class and the code can be decoupled. This means that the class is provided the ability to swap dependency implementations in different environments and allows a component be tested through mocking of dependencies. When having to apply Inversion of Control and getting the instance, there are two ways to get it without having to know about any concrete implementations. These ways are Dependency Injection and Service Locator. Dependency Injection injects an instance by using construction injection or property injection while Service Locator injects an instance based on the configurations of the concrete class. Dependency Injection is mostly used than that of Service Locator, but Service Locator can be used when there are situations Dependency Injection seems impractical.

Based on the content of this article, I would say that it was a good overview about the ideas of Inversion of Control. The author was able to give a few examples of using it and have the UML diagrams to back up with the codes provided. What I did before to understand Inversion of Control was to envision real life scenarios to compare without and with it. The concept is that without it, there is limited options for a software consumer. But by implementing Inversion of Control, there are more options over the software. With that in mind, it made envisioning scenarios easier than it seems.

What I learned from this article is that Inversion of Control shall not be used in all cases because of program flow. The idea is that while it is a useful way to design methods when writing a library that will be reused, it is only critical if there are many cross-cutting concerns. For future practice, I shall try to use Inversion of Control when it is necessary to change a small part of code. This is because it is a practical way of reducing code duplication and it is strong for coding against interfaces instead of implementations.

Link to the article: http://joelabrahamsson.com/inversion-of-control-an-introduction-with-examples-in-net/

From the blog CS@Worcester – Onwards to becoming an expert developer by dtran365 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.