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In any test automation project you're going to run into errors. They might be errors in your programming. They might also be errors raised as your scripts try to interact with the application you're testing. Either way when an error occurs during the execution of your automation code it's considered an 'exception'. That is, your code can't continue to be executed as you intended; *an exception to the rules you've defined in your code has to be handled.* In this article we look at how C# deals with Exceptions and we look at the different types of exceptions you're likely to encounter with Selenium in C#. Contents C# Exception Handling The C# CLR Exception Object Exception Handling in C# Throwing...

Like it or not the most effective way to build automated tests is with code. Yes drag and drop, icon based, user friendly IDE's can be productive. Just that they'll never be as effective or productive as developing automated tests in code. This is why languages like Python are critical to a lot of test automation projects. So in a series of courses that will cover Python, Java Script and C# we start by taking you through the basics of Python. In a series of 14 modules You'll learn about Python …. Module 1 – Operations Module 2 – Variables Module 3 – Operators Module 4 – Lists Module 5 – Loops Module 6 – Functions Module 7 – Modules...

Create a Continuous Testing Environment with the TestComplete REST Api and Virtual Machines Stability and productivity are everything with automated testing. If you're going to be productive with TestComplete you must have a way to test and run your automated tests outside of your development machine. As your tests grow you cannot afford to waste time tying up your development machine as you run your automated tests. It’s crucial that you have separate environments where you can execute tests independently. We’re going to walk you through a simple'ish setup where you develop on one machine and run on a separate virtual machine using TestExecute. Execute a script, your tests run on a VM, results available on your development machine. What...

Introduction The Microsoft Azure DevOps Test Management component offers the possibility of a fully integrated development and test capability for QA and Development teams. It gives agile teams the capability of collaborating in one tool for all the different disciplines. Again, in this review of the test management component, we’ll be focusing on 7 of the most prominent features and assessing Azure DevOps against them. These features are: Assignment Version Control Parameterisation Libraries Results Aggregation Retesting Configurations and Releases Assignment When implementing a process or selecting a test management tool, you’ll always need to assign a test to a tester at some point. Question is do you need to assign at the step, case or cycle level. Do you need to allocate...

Sometimes it’s worth revisiting the basics. Some things you think you know, then when you scratch the surface you realise you didn’t know them quite as well as you thought you did. That’s how it was when I started looking at the fundamentals of REST API’s. I’ve been testing REST API’s for years but I didn’t really know what REST stood for. Do you? There might be 6 architectural principles defining REST (more on those later) but the fundamentals come down to just two things. Funnily enough those two things are highlighted in the name, REST.  REpresentational and  State Transfer Each of these concpets is introduced the following short video:  In short then, Representational means that it should be...

In our series on Test Automation at scale, our first session looks at the architecture of a data driven automation framework running GUI front end tests across large numbers of client machines. We walk you through the architecture of a system that minimises script and code complexity. A system that increases reliability and speeds up test execution.  Critical in this setup is the concept of test case execution isolation. The concept of making sure that each test is run in isolation so that one failure doesn’t cause the whole test run to collapse. With the execution of each test isolated it’s easier to identify and investigate failures. This also makes it easier to scale, as more scenarios and more...

Custom Dashboards and Filters There’s no point putting all this data in and organising everything if you can’t see where you’re up to on your projects. Jira provides you with dashboards that can be customized to your requirements and filters you can setup and save. Both dashboards and filters allow you to see exactly where you are with your particular project. The start of all this is then is the System Dashboard. This is the dashboard you’re presented with when you log in and when you select the ‘View System Dashboard’ option. Each dashboard is just a one page container for a number of gadgets. Where a gadget is a panel that displays a particular set of informations. Some dashboards...

Versions & Components The other major features in Jira that lets us group and categorise our issues are Versions and Components. Both of these features provide us with useful ways to visualise the status of our projects and the work/issues that we need to be focusing on. Each Project you define in Jira can contain many ‘Versions’ and many ‘Components’. Before we look at what Versions and Components are though lets just recap on what a project is. A project in Jira is just a container for a lot of issues. It’s the top level container. Every issue must be assigned to one (and only one) project. With a project we can also create Component and Version identifiers. The issues...

Workflow & Status If you’re looking at tracking work tasks the simplest way of categorising the pieces of work you have is with a few simple status values like ‘To Do’, ‘In Progres’ and ‘Done’. In Jira terms you’d have your issues tracking those pieces of work. Each issue then would be set with a status value of ‘To Do’, ‘In Progress’ and ‘Done’. When you haven’t yet started a piece of work the status is set to ‘To Do’ on the issue. When you pick up the piece of work and start working on it you move the status value for the related issue to ‘In Progress’. And obviously once you’ve finished the work you move the status value...

At this point, having completed module 1 and module 2, we have an SVN server, a repository in that server and we have files/directories in that repository. The whole point of this is to share files and version control them between different users. The next step then is for you to check out the files from the repository. From here we can simulate another user checking out the files from that same repository. In this way, we can see and learn how SVN deals with two people editing the same set of files at the same time.     In the last module, we created two user accounts (user1 and user2). With your first user account then (the one that...