WTANZ: “Test automation series”

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Since the seventh session, the WTANZ topics have all been geared towards test automation.

  • WTANZ07 (Jul 25) offered an introduction to watir. Here we tried to automate simple tasks like logging in, finding a forum and then posting a reply to it.
  • WTANZ08 (Aug 22) was sort of a continuation of the previous session. Here the mission was to find a bug and then write a failing test for it. This session also provided a mini refactoring lesson for me since I placed the task of calling a particular function and the actual test under just one function. In retrospect, (I think Marlena also pointed this out) this session would have been a good time to try out assertions.
  • WTANZ09 (Sep 19) was another session on watir. I missed this session but I did get to read a bit about it through Marlena’s blog post.
  • WTANZ10 (Oct 17) earlier today was an introduction to Cucumber and Gherkin. From what I understand, Cucumber is the tool that does the automated test execution, whereas Gherkin is the language used to define the tests and it’s the language that cucumber understands. With the use of gherkin, test scenarios can be described in the format Given-When-Then-. And being in plain English, the business analyst can then supposedly be requested to write the test scenarios that he expects. Gherkin reminded me of Fitnesse wherein non-programmers are said to be able to write test cases in wiki format. For both tools, I guess the technical part of the actual automation is obscured from the non-programmers allowing them to focus on the scenarios or inputs that they would like to test.

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