04: Alan Richardson: How to create Model Driven Automation Libraries

How to create Model Driven Automation Libraries

Are you an evil tester? Learn from the original Evil Tester himself — Alan Richardson. Alan shares with us his unique insight on not only how to create automation frameworks, but also how to incorporate modeling principles into development scripts as well as using other must- know testing concepts.

About Alan Richardson

Alan is the author of Selenium Simplified and Java for Testers. He also offers online training for Selenium 2 WebDriver Basics with Java and Technical Web Testing 101. He has spoken at conferences the world over, and has been involved in testing for almost 20 years. In November, at Eurostar 2012, Alan co-presented (with Simon Stewart) the “Selenium Clinic” tutorial. They won the award for Best Tutorial.

Quotes & Insights from this Test Talk

• To make things easier, try to use the same tools and technology that your development teams are using.
• Learn the language that the developers are using, because you’ll need their support and assistance.
• Stop thinking “automation framework,” and start looking at building your tests so that they are reusable and simple to extend and use in different ways.
• We should approach the testing of an application by first understanding the layers that the application is built from so we know where the risks are. This helps to branch out from not only business risk, but also testing risk in terms of how the application is built.
• People don’t spend enough time learning how to model applications and learning the different ways of using code to model the world.
• Building an abstraction level too far, too quickly, can hurt your automation efforts.
• If you don’t refactor your test code, you are building up tech debt.
• For test data, try to avoid seeding the environment because it causes an external dependency that can be difficult to maintain.
• Have your tests create the data they need.

Resources

• The Web Application Hacker’s Handbook: Finding and Exploiting Security Flaws
• Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software
• Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests
• Implementation Patterns

Alan’s Online Courses:

• Selenium 2 WebDriver With Java
• Start Using Selenium WebDriver
• Technical Web Testing

Alan’s Books:

• Selenium Simplified
• Java For Testers

Tools

• Cucumber a behavior driven development tool
• Fiddler – a free web debugging proxy for any browser, system or platform
• OWASP Zed Attack Proxy – The Zed Attack Proxy (ZAP) is an easy to use integrated penetration testing tool for finding vulnerabilities in web applications.

Connect with Alan

• Twitter: @EvilTester
• Alan’s Blog: http://www.eviltester.com/
• Alan’s Consultancy Company: http://www.compendiumdev.co.uk