"I'm doing what i'm being paid for..."

That stupid thinking of workers in IT is not acceptable since skilled IT guys should continuously move ahead, learn more things (in adjacent fields too) and grow value and contribution day by day by joint effort.

If you hear from a guy such words as in the post title, probably there are 2 alternatives behind the sentence:
- either this guy is really making great effort but is remained unmotivated by management, project progress, company culture/processes or anything else
- or this guy is pushover and they whine is just attempt to defend themselves. Likely this person is not skilled, not experienced or does not correspond to requirements on that position.
I like to meet guys that don't give in difficulties and don't afraid to face challenges even if s/he never run assigned duties. It's really cool to see how novice manages well something unfamiliar with.

I wish good luck everyone in career path and keep faith - good managers keep watch on your effort!

GUI Test automation using PowerShell

I dug MSDN's articles describing how to utilize PowerShell for test automation
Win forms applications [http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163301.aspx]
Web applications [http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc337896.aspx]

Also here is their blog [http://testfirst.spaces.live.com/blog/]. PowerGUI is IDE for code development. Check out the highlighting video as demo http://powergui.org/shares/powergui/sbin/docs/AutomatedTesting/PowerShell-Automated-Software-Testing.html

My critical review is below...

As author of those articles Dr. James McCaffrey himself states that PowerShell can give lightweight solution for non-complex test automation. I rather agree with this point as PowerShell does not poses to be test automation environment but you can utilize his capabilities for automation too. It may be deal to use PowerShell scripting approach for supplementary action items in your overall test automation framework - that's like using OS objects (FileSystem, MMC, XMLDom, etc). Besides that you may consider to build own test framework basing on PowerShell, Visual Studio environment and moreover using .Net capabilities. This is a big deal that is requiring big effort and addressing to figure out this project reasonability.

Restriction of supporting Microsoft's technologies only may be considered as improper solution of product automation. As I understood, for Win forms PowerShell can process COM and .Net controls, while for Web-based it can work in IE through DOM.

So putting all together, appears for me that PowerShell is not "power" for test automation but it still can assist as part of whole test automation project; another way is to utilize PowerShell for small test projects and only over Microsoft's environments.


PS cmdlet sounds cool and smells Microsoft.

TOOLS: Diff with Sorting and RegExp filtering

Data comparison is one of essential parts of testing. There are varieties of assertion approaches which fulfill automatic checking of actual output against expected result (or etalon). I'd like to describe one completed recipe which consists of the following steps:

1. Select a proper diff tool (supporting CL). Basically this tool should be capable to run diff against files (one-to-one) and against folders (recursively over all files) and should have variety of options (filtering, exclusions, omitting, grouping, file names/extensions filtering, escaping and supplementary rules and options)
2. Specify filtering options using regular expressions: -excluding lines and - excluding substrings
3. Employ supplementary steps like lines ordering (e.g. sort command in Win CL), merging
   

#1-2 are supported in ExamDiffPro - I've used this tool with no problems. Another advantage of ExanDiffPro is capability to import/export settings. It's especially valuable if you need to run comparision under differenet options in CL. If you need to run comparison against huge data sets, try to look at comparing using checksum MD5

That's all I have for this post. Your experience?

Cloud testing as SaaS is to kill performance and reliability testing vendor’s tools? {Generalized: ~Cloud~ for development}

Not sure I have enough time to run deep investigation whether this question answers Yes or No. But at first sight this approach is profitable against purchasing very costly tools like from HP or Borland. Hopefully the dynamic of expanding SaaS for testing will grow down the road. It seems the biggest player on the cloud testing is Amazon. If they really provide honest and cost-efficient plan with capability and flexibility of load testing model, so performance professionals should take a sharp look on this trending technology. Indeed, why should I pay thousands $$ for load testing especially for a single application/task?

Eventually the SaaS will come to narrow segments like load testing, hosting specific environments like test stands, build and continuous integration servers. I’m also interested if SaaS providers will place such plans like temporary/limited access to dedicated environments running various OSs, apps and services and as premium services they could prepare and let on lease required virtual machine configurations. I think this a great gate for vendors of professional toolkits, let say HP could provide such plans for their QC, QTP and LoadRunner. Here is a scheme: ready environment + preinstalled and configured vendor’s tool + supplementary package (like open source popular tools, e.g. Subversion, notepad++, XAMPP, etc). That would be perfect for automated testing particularly on short and middle projects duration. Resulting in significant reduce of cost on environmental needs will cause many advantages such as test automation ROI improvement and removing overheads on administration and supporting environments.


Such huge players like HP, Microsoft (Win Oss, Visual Studio, MS), Oracle&Sun made steps in this direction, the rest guys will move up too sooner. But I’d like to have their services more affordable, as well as with hosting specific dev/QA software and finally, I wish they propose flexible tariffs with “pay just for how long you use service”. Also there is a field to host, maintain and administrate Open source only, for instance – providing variations of preconfigured Linux distributives jointly with services – please don’t mix with hosting – I want various environments for development and testing with temporary ownership.

Is anyone who has success story of using SaaS for development and testing?

XML for building high-end test frameworks

The pasted slides below provides real technical-oriented review. I like such kind of content that does not wate time for nothing like guru's philospphy. Take a look at this:

Automated Testing Of Web Applications Using XML

View more presentations from diongillard.