Sam Woods, Puppet Labs
How many people get frustrated after spending hours writing tests, then even more time debugging failures before finally being able to determine a root cause or fix? I have spent a lot of time thinking about this and experimenting with ways to increase efficiency for these 2 aspects of UI automation. Through trial and error throughout my career, I have concluded that there are simple and effective ways to increase velocity of test authoring and root cause analysis of test failures, which are often overlooked. Even teams with relatively mature automation processes can be blissfully unaware of the opportunities they have to make major improvements to their automation velocity.
Besides the well known Page Object Pattern [1], we will walk through effectively using setup and cleanup functions, how to properly structure helper functions, how to model data consumed by the application, and more. Finally, techniques for increasing the speed of determining the root cause of automation failures will be demonstrated, such as: built in logging, taking screen shots on failure, useful integration with your defect tracking tool, and determining which failures are likely to be the same root cause through stack trace analysis. By including these relatively simple strategies in your own automation, you could increase your efficiency and be able to add more automated tests while spending less time debugging failures.
Target Audience: Intermediate
2015 Technical Paper, Sam Woods, Paper, Slides, Notes, Video.
