November 2010 Monthly Meeting Summary
Topic:
Software Development Tips and Tricks for Test Automation - presentation by Jim Moore
Jim Moore has been slinging code for twenty years in Northern Virginia and is currently a Senior Software
Engineer at Metron Aviation. He has been a regular attendee at the NoVaTAIG meetings since they began in January
2009 and during that time has noted that testers who are not experienced software engineers may not always be aware
of many of the tips and tricks that experienced programmers utilize in their software development work. These can
make the tester's life easier and improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their test automation coding practices.
Jim will discuss a variety of these useful tips and tricks in an informative and entertaining presentation.
Took place on: Wed. November 10 2010 6:30 PM
Attendance: 22
Meeting Notes:
Initially we discussed challenges in test automation among the attendees, such as:
- Trying to plan automation early on when the SUT was still in design stages
- Retrofitting autoamtion was mentioned as a challenge
- Reusability issues
- Issues of logging and WHAT to log
- Correlating logged info to results data
- Protecting tests from SUT changes - robustness/fragility issues
- Evaluating quality of the automation
- Refactoring and maintenance issues
- How to do autamation well without a dev background
- Estimation of automation efforts
- Test data - refreshing /creating challenges
- Undocumented assumptions
Then we discussed tips and tricks:
- Build things in smaller chunks
- Single responsibility pattern/principle
- Don't repeat yourself in your code
- Think about components
- Modularizing vs cut-and-paste
- Write a little, test a little (eg, unit testing)
- Stop and abstract/modularize/refactor periodically
- Comments/documentation
- CM/version control (TortoiseSVN for windows and GIT were mentioned)
- Databases for test automation - SQLLite; 'baseline files' were discussed
- Logging - Log4J and Log4Net were mentioned
- Utilize try/catch
- Use 'sandboxes' to try things out
- USe virtual machines like Virtual Box
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