Think Like a Tester

One year ago, my company adopted something we call the “Quality Maturity Model”. We created the model to help teams measure how they are doing with behaviors that support creating quality applications. The project has been a big success, so I’ve decided to share some details about it with the world!

We started out by coming up with a definition of quality. Using this excellent blog post as a jumping-off point, we defined the seven Attributes of Quality at Paylocity.
A Quality application is:
Valuable: It meets the customer’s needs
Functional: It does what we say it does, and we can measure those interactions
Reliable: It is available when needed
Secure: It protects customer and company information
Performant: It responds within an acceptable time
Usable: It is easy and intuitive to use
Maintainable: It is easy to test, deploy, automate, monitor, update, and scale

After we had defined these attributes, we created a list of behaviors development teams could do that would help ensure those attributes were part of our products. For each of those behaviors, we determined what a minimum version of that behavior would look like, what a standard version would look like, and what excellent would look like. From there, we created the Quality Maturity Model.

Here are some examples of the behaviors defined in the Quality Maturity Model:
Valuable: Team identifies and investigates customer needs
Functional: Team creates, executes, monitors, and maintains reliable test automation
Reliable: Team actively monitors the health of their applications and takes appropriate action as needed
Secure: Team creates and adheres to a security strategy following security best practices
Performant: Team consistently meets SLO standards for their product
Usable: Team ensures the product is usable on multiple devices and supported browsers/platforms when applicable
Maintainable: Team manages and owns their deployments following the release management process

We rolled out the Quality Maturity Model to all the teams and asked them to identify which of these behaviors they were already demonstrating. From there, we asked teams to create quarterly goals to adopt more of the behaviors. Quality Leaders were each assigned a group of teams to meet with monthly to help answer any questions and hold teams accountable.

After a year of working on adoption of the model, we’ve made significant progress! Here are some examples:

A team committed to having the whole team own the test automation. The team works together to make sure that tests aren’t duplicated; for example, if a unit test already covers what’s needed to test a feature, there’s no need to write a UI test. This saves the team significant time in test creation and maintenance, freeing them up to focus on new features.

Another team made sure that the whole team knew how to use the UI automation framework. A developer was able to do a complete regression test on the UI work he was doing and fix all the bugs he found without involving anyone else on the team.

One tester on a team created a reusable test plan so the developers would be able to determine what to test. When both the testers on the team were on leave at the same time, the developers were able to carry on with feature development and testing with no problems.

A team was able to use the progress they made in test automation to speed up their release times from once a month to twice a month.

If you are looking for a way to enhance the quality of your product, minimize escaped defects, and speed up your delivery time, the Quality Maturity Model may be a great way to help. I recommend starting a discussion with the leaders at your company about what quality behaviors you’d like to see in your teams!

Most software companies would agree that in order to release quality software in a timely fashion, good test automation is necessary. There’s simply not enough time to wait around for manual testers to do a complete pass of regression tests before releasing new features; progress would slow to a point that the company would not be competitive.

While it’s possible for software developers to write good automated tests, what’s even better is to have a software tester guide the automation projects to make sure that the right things are being tested, and to think of the edge cases that developers might not think of.

But there are many software testers out there who are not actually testers! They can write test automation, but they don’t know how to think like a tester. I call these folks “lazy developers”. They enjoy writing code, and they also enjoy not having to feel responsible for writing good feature code. They can quietly work on their automation projects without worrying about the quality of their code. Unfortunately their poor automation code results in tests that don’t provide the company with the information it needs about the product, which results in poor quality software.

How can you tell if you have a lazy developer rather than a software tester on your team? Here are five key signs:

1. They are not particularly interested in thinking about what to test
   In story grooming sessions, the lazy developer doesn’t have any questions for the team. They don’t participate in the conversation, and they don’t point out any possible problem areas of new features or areas of regression for bug fixes. This can result in many missed opportunities to find bugs.
2. They refuse to do any manual or exploratory testing
   The lazy developer thinks of themselves as an automation engineer and nothing else. They are insulted by suggestions that they do exploratory or manual testing on a new feature. Rather than get to know the product, they’d prefer jumping right in to writing tests. Unfortunately, this means that they really don’t understand how the product works, and they may be automating the wrong things.
3. They are protective of their code and don’t want to share it with others
   Real developers understand that the product code base is a shared code base. No one has exclusive claim to any section of the code. But lazy developers like to have their own little corner of code that no one else looks at. They’ve discovered that by writing automated tests, they can write code that the other developers won’t be interested in, so they won’t interfere with the lazy dev’s pet project. See my post on lone wolves for more information.
4. They have no real interest in the quality of software releases
   The lazy developer doesn’t pay much attention when the team releases software. They are only interested in their automated tests. If the tests run and mostly pass, that’s good enough for them. They don’t make the connection between escaped defects and their tests, because they’re not writing tests to check the quality of the product; they’re writing tests because writing them is fun.
5. They aren’t good at finding bugs
   The lazy developer isn’t good at finding bugs, because they don’t actually care about finding the bugs. If their automation finds a bug, that’s great; they feel like they’ve done their job. But if a bug can’t be found by their automation, they feel it’s probably not that important anyway.

Are YOU a lazy developer?

If any of the above descriptions sound like you, then you might be in the wrong career! Take some time to do the following soul-searching:

• Pay attention to what you enjoy spending time on
  You can definitely be a good software tester and enjoy writing automation code! But if you find yourself sighing inwardly whenever you need to write a test plan, you might really be a developer.
• Notice what kind of stories catch your interest
  When you are reading stories about software online, what gets you excited? Is it the story of an elusive bug that took days of searching to find, or is it a new coding language or an engineering challenge? If development stories excite you more than testing stories, you might be in the wrong role.
• Are you envious of the developers on your team because it seems like they are having more fun?
  Ask your manager if you can do some simple development stories for the team. See if you actually enjoy working on those stories more than you enjoy testing them.
• Is fear holding you back from becoming a developer?
  Perhaps you actually trained to become a software developer, but got stuck in the testing role and never got the courage to leave. Would you be willing to face your fear and take on some additional training? Would you be willing to ask for some coaching from a developer you trust?
• Explore what it would take to become a developer at your company
  If you’ve decided that you are really a developer, talk to your manager. See if there is an established path at your company for making the transition from tester to developer. If there isn’t a path, look for someone at your company who made the transition and ask them how they did it.
• Find a mentor
  Find a developer at your company who has good communication skills, and ask them if they would be willing to mentor you. Let them suggest projects that you can work on that will develop your skills and fill in any technical gaps.

I personally love software testing, and I want to see as many great testers out there as possible! We need people who care about quality so much that they are willing to go the extra mile. But we also need passionate developers. Our software teams will be more effective if everyone is doing a job that they love!

Last week, I released a web application for people to use to practice UI and API automation. It took me about four months to develop, working on weeknights and weekends, and it was quite an adventure! Here are five lessons I learned while developing the app.

Lesson One: Software development is hard; really hard
You’ve probably heard this before, and probably from the developers you work with. But unless you’ve actually tried to develop an app yourself, you really don’t know how hard it is. I remember in my early days of software testing, when I would find bugs where field validations weren’t working correctly, and I would assume that the developer just didn’t care. But now that I know just how hard it is to get validations to even work at all, I am really sympathetic!

Lesson Two: We have product owners for a reason
Take a moment to appreciate your product owner this week; the work they do is more important than you realize. When I started to work on the front end of my application I didn’t think it would be very complicated because it only has a few simple screens. But as I was coding the pages, I kept coming up with questions about how each page should be connected to the others. Finally I had to stop what I was doing and sketch out wireframes. This is the kind of thing that product owners do for us so that we don’t have to!

Lesson Three: Even the best coding courses won’t teach you everything
As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, last year I took a really great Node.js course to prepare me for this project. I learned a ton about how to create and validate APIs, how to create a web page, how to work with a database, and how to publish an application. But there were some details missing about working with web pages and JavaScript files. Even though the course was comprehensive, it couldn’t teach me absolutely everything. I didn’t have time to take another course, so I wound up doing a lot of web searching.

Lesson Four: There are a lot of different ways to solve a problem
All that web searching brought me to my fourth realization: there are a lot of different ways to do things with code, and this makes software development very confusing. One of the things I struggled with was how to get authentication working on my site. I had it working in the back end- thanks to the Node.js course- but I had no idea how to get it working in the front end. My searches would bring up several different blog posts, each with a different solution. I’d start trying to follow one tutorial, and then hit a roadblock and decide that it wouldn’t work for me. Finally I found this post, which came the closest to meeting my needs.

Lesson Five: Testing and developing are different skill sets
There has been a lot of focus recently on making sure that the whole development team owns quality, and this is a really good thing! Test automation is more reliable and scalable when developers help with the automation frameworks and add new tests. But working on this project, it was so clear to me that testing and developing need really different mindsets. While I was developing the app, I kept on thinking of all the different things I could do to test it, and I had to tell myself to stop thinking like that so that I could focus and get the development work done! When I’d finished creating the API, then I took a break and created all the tests I could think of. And when I finished the UI I had a lot of fun doing exploratory testing on the app. There may be some people out there in the world who enjoy both developing and testing, but I’ve never met anyone who is truly passionate about both.

Developing my app made me understand the big picture of web applications better, and made me appreciate the developers and product owners I work with even more! If you have some time to spare, I recommend going on an adventure like this yourself.

I am writing a book on software testing, which I’m hoping to publish by the end of the year. In order to help my readers learn about manual testing, API testing, and API and UI automation, I decided I’d like to have an example application to accompany the book.

There are a lot of great practice sites out there for API testing and UI automation, but not a lot of sites that offer both, and some of those sites are a little too complex for someone learning the basics. So I decided to create my own!

The Contact List App is a simple web application that allows testers to create an account, log in, and add, edit, and delete a list of contacts. The web elements are easy to access, so it’s great for getting started with UI automation. The application includes an API for testers to practice GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, and DELETE operations.

This was my first time creating a complete application, and it was quite a learning experience! I’ll share some of the things I learned in a future post. I hope that you will find the application helpful as you hone your testing skills, and please email me with any feedback.

If you’d like to stay informed about my upcoming book, and perhaps even preview chapters, you can sign up for my mailing list here. In the meantime, enjoy the Contact List App!

Have you ever been testing an API and gotten involved in a dispute about what a response code should be?  Perhaps you witnessed a disagreement between two developers, or perhaps a developer was insisting the response code should be one thing and you thought it should be something different.  You might have gone to Stack Overflow to see what others think, and discovered people referencing something called an RFC.  

RFC stands for “Request for Comments”.  The RFCs related to HTTP protocols are produced by the ISOC: the Internet Society.  The Internet Society consists of tens of thousands of members, a staff, and a board of trustees.  They produce the standards that most developers use when developing websites and web applications, and those standards are written up in the form of RFCs.  

The first HTTP RFC was created in 1996, and RFC 2616, the most recent RFC that discusses response codes, was created in 1999.  These RFCs are surprisingly easy to read!  Let’s take a look at some of the contents of RFC 2616 and see how we can apply them to real-life scenarios.

Responses to POST requests:

In section 9.5, the RFC states “The action performed by the POST method might not result in a resource that can be identified by a URI. In this case, either 200 (OK) or 204 (No Content) is the appropriate response status, depending on whether or not the response includes an entity that describes the result.” So when you are doing a POST that doesn’t create a new resource, such as a request that checks for the existence of a resource, you could use a 200 or a 204 response code. But if your POST is returning a response body, you must use the 200 response code rather than the 204 response code, because the 204 response code cannot include a response body.

Responses to PUT requests:

In section 9.6, the RFC says “If an existing resource is modified, either the 200 (OK) or 204 (No Content) response codes SHOULD be sent to indicate successful completion of the request.” So as with the POST request, if you are modifying a resource and not returning anything in the body of the response, you could use a 200 or a 204 response code. But if you were returning something in the response body, you’d definitely want to use a 200.

Responses where the user is not allowed access to a resource:

Section 10.4.4 says of a 403 “Forbidden” response code: “The server understood the request, but is refusing to fulfill it. Authorization will not help and the request SHOULD NOT be repeated. If the request method was not HEAD and the server wishes to make public why the request has not been fulfilled, it SHOULD describe the reason for the refusal in the entity.  If the server does not wish to make this information available to the client, the status code 404 (Not Found) can be used instead.” So if your user does not have permission to view a resource, and you don’t mind if the user knows that the resource exists, then you can use a 403 response code. But if you don’t want the user to even know that the resource exists, because perhaps that might give a malicious user too much information, then you’d want to return a 404 so that all they’d know was that the resource was not found.

Hopefully these examples have shown how useful the HTTP RFC documents can be. So the next time you are testing an API and you’re wondering if you’re seeing the right response code, try going to the source!

The very first test automation job I had was for a company that had no QA Engineer before I was hired. I’d never done automation before, but I convinced the company that with my rudimentary knowledge of Java, I’d be able to figure it out. This was long before there were awesome online resources like Test Automation University, so it took me a long time and a lot of trial and error before I had automated tests that would run and pass. My tests were long, flaky, hard to maintain and filled with implicit waits and duplicated code, but they were my tests, and I had really enjoyed solving the problem of test automation on my own.

Then the company hired a new software developer, and our manager thought it would be a great idea for him to learn about our software by looking at my tests. Without consulting me, the new developer completely rewrote my tests. I was really annoyed, until I looked at the tests and saw that he had reorganized them using page object models and methods so that no code was duplicated. It would be so much easier to maintain the tests now! That week I learned that it’s always best to work with others rather than going it alone, because others often have skills or information that we don’t.

Software developers know this already, because they are required to collaborate with others through feature planning and code reviews. But often testers aren’t required to do this. Test automation code is just as important as production code because of the value it provides, and for that reason, we shouldn’t be lone wolves, even if we enjoy it! Here are some lone wolves that you may encounter or recognize in yourself.

The Gollum: In The Lord of the Rings, Gollum loved his ring so much he called it his “precious”. For the test automation Gollum, her automated tests are her “precious”. She’s worked long and hard at those tests and is very proud of them! Unfortunately, because she was the only one who worked on the tests, they make sense only to her. Nobody wants to help maintain the tests because they are so hard to understand. As a result, she is the only one who can fix the tests when they break, and therefore she has become the bottleneck for automated testing on her team.

How to stop being The Gollum: Share your test automation with others and get feedback on how they could be more useful and maintainable. Implement the feedback and repeat.

The Frank Sinatra: Just as the real Frank Sinatra sang about doing it “My Way”, the test automation Frank wants to do it all his way. He is convinced that he alone knows the right way to do test automation. And unsurprisingly, the right way is with his favorite tool! Every other tool falls short in his estimation, so he’s going to stick with his tool even if the rest of the company is using something different. As a result, he can’t collaborate and share ideas with testers on other teams, and his test automation never improves.

How to stop being The Frank Sinatra: Try some new test automation tools! You don’t have to love every single one, just give yourself enough time to really understand their strong points. You may be surprised at how much test tools have improved in recent years!

The Magpie: This species of bird is attracted to shiny objects. The test automation Magpie is attracted to new test automation frameworks! If it’s new, she wants to try it out, and she loves writing test automation from scratch. In her opinion, any problems with her existing automation must be problems with the framework, and the problems become an excuse to scrap the project and start over again with a new framework. This means her team never has a complete test suite that they can run and rely upon. It also means that the team has to keep up with all the framework changes, which will make them reluctant to contribute to the automation.

How to stop being The Magpie: Get input from your team about what framework would be best for your application, then stick with it. When you run into trouble, ask your team for help, or ask other test automation engineers. You don’t have to keep using the framework forever, but use it at least long enough to see it working in CI/CD.

The Hermit: The Hermit simply loves working alone. He’s very busy working on his automation all by himself, so he doesn’t want to take the time to explain what he’s doing to the rest of his team or to any other testers. He hates asking for help and sees it as a sign of weakness; he’d rather figure everything out on his own. As a result, his automation never improves, and no one at the company ever benefits from his expertise.

How to stop being The Hermit: Find a developer or test automation engineer that you admire and trust, and ask them for their opinion on your automation work. Implement some of their suggestions. Volunteer to lead a workshop on something you’re really good at. Try to help one person a week who is stuck on a thorny automation problem.

Software is a collaborative adventure! Building software is complicated. There are many facets of software quality to consider, while at the same time delivering features that will put your company ahead of its competitors. That’s why we don’t have room for lone wolves anymore. Software testers need to work together to contribute to test automation projects that deliver fast, accurate results. And software testers need to work with software developers to make sure that quality goes both ways: we need quality production code and quality test code.

Imagine that you are working on a team that is creating a new feature that allows users to submit and watch videos. The application uses a third party- we’ll call it Encodurz- that encodes the videos that are uploaded to your application. You work hard to test the feature; making sure that the UI is flawless, that the user journeys make sense, and that the videos play correctly, among many other things.

It’s time for your new feature to be released to the world, and you’re excited! But on the day of the release, Encodurz has an outage. No videos can be encoded, so none of the uploaded videos will display! Your users don’t know that it’s not your fault; all they see is that the new feature doesn’t work. They call and complain to customer service and they post complaints on Twitter. This is why reliability engineering is important!

Reliability engineering focuses on the ability of applications to be as available as possible. It aims to offer a good user experience, even in the following situations:
* The server goes down
* The database is unavailable
* An API that your application relies on is unavailable
* A third-party provider that your application depends on is unavailable

Do you know how your application will behave in those scenarios? If not, it sounds like it’s a good time to test those scenarios! There are two ways to test:

Bring the service down
You can bring a server down by unplugging it, but chances are your server is not nearby for you to do that. But you can also bring a server, a webservice, or a database down by shutting it down using scripted commands. If you don’t have permission to do that, you can find someone in DevOps at your company who has the correct permissions.

Change your connection strings
It’s really easy to simulate an outage of a server, a database, an API or any other service your application depends on simply by changing the way your application connects to it. For example, if your app connects to your company database with a username and password, all you need to do is simply send in a bad password. Or you could change the URI needed for the connection so that it’s incorrect.

NOTE that it is a bad idea to test either of the above strategies in Production, at least until your application is VERY resilient. You will want to do this testing in your test environment.

Once you have discovered what happens when your application or its dependencies has an outage, it’s time to make your app as resilient as possible. Here are seven strategies for doing that:

1. Use a “circuit-breaker”
   This method puts logic in the code that tries connecting to a resource a few times, and when it is unable to connect, switches over to a different resource. For example, if your application usually points to Server A, and you have a backup server called Server B, when the circuit-breaker is tripped the connection changes over to Server B.
2. Use retries
   Sometimes a third-party app will fail temporarily for an unknown reason. You don’t want your request to the app to fail and never try again. So you can build in some retries; perhaps if the request fails, you wait 30 seconds and try again, if it fails again you wait 60 seconds and try again, and so on. You don’t want to retry indefinitely, but instead set some sort of time limit so if the request still hasn’t succeeded when the limit is met, an error is returned.
3. Use cached data
   It’s a great idea to have some kind of caching service that will be able to serve up data if a request fails for some reason. When the request fails, your application just grabs the slightly-stale cached data and returns that instead.
4. Enter into read-only mode
   If your application detects that there’s a problem writing to a data source, you can configure it to go into a read-only mode so that your users can at least see their data. You should set a message to display when this is the case to explain to users why they can’t update their data at the moment.
5. Provide messaging that something isn’t quite right
   It is so annoying to get a cryptic error like “Error: T-128556” when using an application. That’s not helpful at all! Instead, provide your users with as much detail as you can about what’s wrong. In the example at the beginning of this post, there could have been a message that read “Sorry, we are having an issue connecting to our video encoding software at the moment. Please try again in a few minutes.”
6. Have a status page that explains what is going on
   If your application goes down completely or is very degraded, it’s a great idea to have a status page (hosted on a different server) that provides a way to communicate to your end users what’s happening. You could include a timestamp with your time zone, a list of the features that are affected, and a message about what’s going wrong. Then you can keep the status page updated at regular intervals until the problem is fixed.
7. After the problem has ended, do a post-mortem to see what lessons you’ve learned
   If the outage was very brief or only affected a few users, you might not need to make the post-mortem public. But if it was a big outage, it’s a great idea to communicate to customers what happened, why it happened, and how you are going to prevent it in the future. See Slack’s message about their January 4th outage for a really good example of this.
   

No application can run perfectly 100% of the time; servers are imperfect and our apps are almost always dependent upon outside forces. But it’s important to know exactly what will happen when services are down and to figure out the best ways to respond to those issues before they happen. As testers, we can encourage our team to participate in this process.

It’s a new year, and a new year means it’s time for new challenges! My challenge to you is: this year, learn- and I mean REALLY learn- a programming language. Don’t just learn “enough to be dangerous”, or enough to write test automation; really understand the components of the language and how to use them.

I did this last year, and it was one of the most rewarding things I did! I’ve always liked Node, so I decided to learn Node.js. I took this awesome course; it took about nine months for me to complete it, and it was definitely worth the time it took.

Why should you take the time to really learn a programming language? Here are four reasons:

1. You will understand what your test code is doing
   We’ve all done it- we want to get something done in our test automation, we do a quick search on Stack Overflow to see how other people have accomplished it, and we copy and paste their code. But when we do this, we don’t really understand what our test code is doing. This can result in flaky tests that we don’t know how to fix. When we fully understand our code, however, it’s easy to fix.
   
2. You will write better code, which means more maintainable tests.
   When you understand the principles of writing code in your chosen language, you’ll write clean code. You’ll know how to set things up like the page object model, and refactor code to make sure you’re not repeating yourself. You’ll put values into a config file so that your code will be easily reusable by everyone on your team. This will result in tests that are easy to maintain.
   
3. You will have sympathy for developers.
   Early in my testing career, I’m ashamed to say that I had a certain disdain for developers who couldn’t figure out how to validate date fields or phone numbers. When I tried coding these things myself, however, I discovered just how difficult they were. Coding is hard! Once you’ve tried writing an application and struggled with what seems on the surface to be a simple problem, you’ll respect the developers you work with so much more. This will enable you to work together more effectively.
   
4. You will understand your product’s code better.
   Understanding how to code in your chosen language won’t just make you better at writing code, it will make you better at reading code. You’ll be able to look at your production code and see what it’s doing and why. This will give you ideas for how to test it. For example, if you looked at the code for a form field and you saw that one of the values was expecting an enum, you might decide that it would be a good idea to try entering a value that wasn’t included in the enum, or a value that wasn’t in all caps, to see if the program would respond appropriately.
   

So this year, I challenge you to really learn a programming language! And once you’ve completed whatever course you’ve chosen, try writing an application on your own. I’ll be using the skills I learned in the Node.js course I took to create a simple application that readers of my forthcoming book will be able to use for testing practice. Let’s all become better coders together!

I’ve been reading and reviewing one quality-related book a month for all of 2020, and it’s been a lot of fun! It was a great way to motivate myself to read books on software testing. My final book review of the year is “Leading Quality”, by Ronald Cummings-John and Owais Peer. The authors started their own business, which provides global testing services and test strategy for companies. In Leading Quality, they discuss the important lessons they’ve learned about how businesses think about and generate quality in their applications.

The book is designed for quality leaders, and it is made up of three sections. In Section I, Becoming a Leader of Quality, the authors discuss the three quality narratives that often define a company’s test strategy. None of these narratives are “wrong”; they are simply a way to define how your company is currently thinking. The Ownership Narrative focuses on who is responsible for quality. Ideally, the answer should be “Everyone”! The “How to Test” Narrative focuses on what tools and techniques are used in testing. It’s important to have a clear understanding of what your options are and what the maturity of your product is when using this narrative. The Value Narrative focuses on what the return on investment is for quality activities. This could include metrics like revenue potential, savings, and risk mitigation.

Section II, Mastering Your Strategic Decisions focuses on making decisions about when and how to test. There’s a discussion of the three stages of product maturity: the validation stage, where a new product is in its infancy and the team is rushing to get it to market and prove the idea; the predictability stage, where the product has been proven and now the team is focused on cleaning up tech debt in order to be ready to scale; and the scaling stage, where the product has a high number of users and the team is focused on minimizing the negative impact of any bug.

Section III, Leading Your Team to Accelerate Growth, discusses the steps for creating quality at your company: set the vision, assess your starting point, and determine a strategy to achieve the vision. Expect that the strategy will change as you go. Determine what company metrics you’d like to align with to measure your success. Examples of metrics include: attention-based, which measures how much time a user spends on the platform, transaction-based, which measures sales, and productivity-based, which measures how quickly a user can be successful at an activity.

Leading Quality is a short book that is packed full of valuable suggestions for any team or company leader. I recommend it to anyone who would like to think about developing an effective quality strategy for their company.

Now that I’ve completed my twelve book reviews for the year, I thought it would be helpful to show the whole list here:
Agile Testing Condensed, by Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory
The Unicorn Project, by Gene Kim
Enterprise Continuous Testing, by Wolfgang Platz with Cynthia Dunlop
Continuous Testing for DevOps Professionals, by Eran Kinsbruner and contributors
Perfect Software and Other Illusions About Testing, by Gerald Weinberg
Unit Testing Principles, Practices, and Patterns, by Vladimir Khorikov
Performance Testing- A Practical Guide and Approach, by Albert Witteveen
Explore It! Reduce Risk and Increase Confidence with Exploratory Testing, by Elizabeth Hendrickson
Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps, by Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim
The Way of the Web Tester, by Jonathan Rasmusson
Clean Code, by Robert C. Martin and contributors
and of course, Leading Quality, by Ronald Cummings-John and Owais Peer

And now for the BIG news! All year I have been working on a book of my own: a comprehensive look at software testing! I’m nearly finished with the first draft and will be refining it and publishing it in the next year. In order to have the time to work on this massive project, I will be scaling back my blog posts to one post a month. If you’d like to stay informed about my progress on my book, be sure to sign up for my email list using this form.

I wish you all a Happy 2021, and happy reading!

Last Feburary, I checked out Cypress for the first time, and I was astounded! I wrote a post about just how easy it was to get started running Cypress. Cypress is so easy to set up because it runs within your native browser (or headless), so you don’t need to bother with browser drivers as you do with Selenium.

In June, the folks at Cypress announced that they had created a “Real World App”, which is an app designed to help people learn how to use Cypress automation for both API and UI testing. The instructions for getting started with the Real World App are fairly simple, but I thought I’d try to make them even simpler in this blog post.

Prerequisites: To use the Real World App, you’ll need to have Git, Node, and Yarn installed. You can check to see what you already have installed by going to your command line and typing:
git –version
node –version
yarn –version
If you get a version number in response to each of these commands, you are off to a great start! Note that you will need to have Node version 12 or above in order to run the Real World App, so if you have a version below that, you can follow the same instructions to update Node as you would to install Node.

To install Git, go to this page and follow the instructions for your operating system.
To install Node, go to this page and click on the LTS tab. Download either the Windows Installer or the MacOS Installer, open the installer, and follow the prompts.
To install Yarn, go to this page and follow the instructions for your operating system. For MacOS, I recommend using the Homebrew option. For Windows, I recommend downloading the msi installer.

Once you have followed all of the installation instructions, check one more time to make sure that the installations were successful by running these commands:
git –version
node –version
yarn –version

Cloning the App: You are now ready to copy the Cypress Real World App to your machine. First you’ll need to clone the project in Git:
* Go to this page, and at the top of the page you’ll see a button that says “Code”.
* Click on this button, and in the dropdown, click on the clipboard icon. This will copy the Git address of the Real World App code.
* Navigate in your command line to where you would like to install the app. (If you don’t know how to do this, check out this post.) Then type git clone, and paste the Git address that you copied in the previous step. Click Enter, and the app will be cloned to your directory.

Installing and Running the App: To install the application, first navigate to your new project location in the command line and then type yarn install. Yarn will look at all of the dependencies needed to run the app and install them for you. Next, type yarn dev in the command line. This script will start up the application on your machine. You’ll see a new tab open up in your browser with the app’s login page!

Get to Know the App: Take a moment to log into the app and see what you can do with it. When the application started up, it created some sample users that you can use to log in. To find a username, open a new tab in the command line window, navigate to your project location, and then type yarn list:dev:users. Choose one of the usernames, and log in with the password s3cret. Once you’re logged in, try doing things like creating a new bank account and sending money to another user.

Start Cypress: At this point, we’ve started the app, but we haven’t started Cypress! Let’s do that now. Type yarn cypress:open in the command line. You should see the Cypress window open, and the window will list several api and ui tests.

Run the Tests: In the upper right corner of the Cypress window, you’ll see a play button with the words “Run 16 integration specs”. Click on this button. A test runner window will open, and you’ll see the tests fly by! Marvel at the fact that you can run over 100 tests in just over 2 minutes. The first set of tests are the API tests, so you won’t see anything happening in the right side of the test runner window. When the UI tests begin, you’ll see everything that’s happening in the UI in the right side of the window. When the tests are done, try running just a single test script by clicking on it in the Cypress window.

Look at the Test Code: Now it’s time to look at the code that runs the tests. Open up the cypress-real-world-app folder using your favorite code editor (I’m a huge fan of Visual Studio Code, which works in both Windows and MacOS). To find the test scripts, click on the cypress folder in the file explorer of the code editor, then click on the tests folder. You should see two folders of test scripts: one for the API tests and one for the UI tests. These should match what you see in the Cypress window. Click on a UI test and on an API test to see what they look like. See how much of the code you can understand.

Make a Small Change to the Code: Let’s try making a change to the code. First, let’s run a test. In the Cypress window, click on the auth.spec.ts test. A new test window will open and run that test script. Now open up the auth.spec.ts file in your code editor. Make a simple change to the code, such as changing the last name in the userInfo (line 39). Save the change, and watch the tests automatically run again in the test window. In the test window, if you open up the test called “should allow a visitor to sign-up, login, and logout”, you can scroll over the different steps of the test and see snapshots of what was happening at each step, including adding the new last name from line 39.

Continue Your Exploration: Keep playing around with the code to see how much you can understand. When you are feeling more confident, try creating your own test script using the elements in the existing tests. Simply add a new file to the api or ui folder, and make sure it has .spec.ts at the end of the name. You should see your new test added to the Cypress window, and you can run it by clicking on it.

I hope that this exercise has shown you just how easy it is to get started with Cypress! For more information, check out Cypress’ excellent documentation.