selenium

Cross platform rant

/ jankka / Leave a comment

I just can’t get it; How come it seems to be too difficult for developers provide a cross platform functionality that actually works? I mean come on you there. I’ve been learning to use this Robot Framework as the starting point for my own private ATDD -project (Called Marvin, due to Hitchhikers Guide to Galaxy, of course). This morning I started to create more test cases in order to start (later on) the development of the new log in -features. And I thought it would be a good use for my work laptop. Really, it has 16 GB of RAM, a processor and a hard drive. The only unfortunate thing about it is that it uses Windows 7. Due to reasons not quite clear to me, to be honest. It seems to have something to do with the IT -departments capabilities on monitoring and updating the end -users laptops and most likely the ability to remote -reset the hard drive in case the laptop is stolen. Or lost. Apparently the solution used there, in the wide America, is not flexible enough to be used in the real world. Well, now I’m just being nasty here, but still, we do develop stuff that runs above Linux and the development is done on windows. This of course applies to testing, too. Sigh.

Anyhow, everything worked just fine in the beginning. I did install the RobotFramework -eclipse -plugin and all. Ended up installing Robot Framework and its Selenium2Webdriver -library, too. Like I did last week on the Linux- & OSX- laptops. Like said, everything was fine. Until I had to actually execute the tests I had created.

I just can’t get the ancient profile -thinking Firefox keeps having on windows. Really. There’s no point of that. At the moment it actually really just slows down the development. And of course gains my frustration and gets me writing this blog -entry (which is not that bad thin, though). I tried to follow the instructions, too. Really guys, you who develop the Robot Framework, you could create a decent entry on how to configure Firefox and webdriver in Windows in order to get the test cases executed. All I found was Python Webdriver -instructions, which I have been using previously myself. Those do work. But there was no single entry anywhere that pointed to a working version of the setup.

So here I am; Browsing the web on my Firefox running on my ancient laptop that runs Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (With encrypted HardDrive, by the way) and getting ready to install the RobotFramework Eclipse -plugin to LiClipse pulling the latest changes from GitHub and executing the actual tests. In windows that was impossible (well ok, just NOT worth the effort), in Linux, it should not take more than 30 minutes for me to get a decent FAIL on the first test cases.

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Learning curves

/ jankka / Leave a comment

It seems I have a road ahead. Not sure what is going to happen, but at least I know that I’ll enjoy the ride. The ride will be long and it will be hard at times, but all I have to do is to remember that I have all the time in the world for this and the target is not to create a perfect application, but to learn how to automate tests and develop with Python and Robot Framework. Both skills I see as needed in the future.

First of all, after everything was installed yesterday, I sat down and went through some tutorials. Both git & Robot Framework are getting more familiar now. Far from being perfect, but at least I’ve been using both. Git is, by the way, a lot more intuitive with the commands than CVS. And it really neat to use a service like GitHub to store my stuff in. At the moment the solution I started to lab with is stored as private in GitHub. In the future I plan to create a public variant on that in order to get it shared properly.

I also managed to start the Algorithms -project and created the first excercise. It is a simple insertion sort I managed to get together by help from stackoverflow (a really good site to search for information;)) and a slight use of my brain. I actually needed the stackoverflow -solution more or less as interpreter to the algorithm -books pseudo -code.

And last, but not least, I actually have now done my first time ever ATDD -approach on developing. The test case was created and it failed in the beginning. After some coding I managed to get it also go through and got a PASS as result. And the test case is of course using selenium webdriver -library to verify that the web -page is up and running.

As a bonus I actually got an idea about a solution on how to parse some input strings properly with groovy -script in SoapUI. A thing I will need to do at work next week anyhow.

So to say, it has been a proper weekend.