We use Microsoft Test Manager to test out applications. We had initially created Test Plans for each Application we wanted to test. So our test plans have this structure:
Application A
Application B
Application C
Now, in each Iteration, we are getting new Builds for testing.
So, should we keep the same Test Plans and editing their appropriate fields (Build in use, Iteration, Configuration, ...) or is it better to create new ones for each iteration? Something like this:
Application A - Iteration 1
Application A - Iteration 2
Application B - Iteration 1
Application B - Iteration 2
Application C - Iteration 1
Application C - Iteration 2
And does it make sense to create a new Test Plan for every new build?
Test Plans are usually created for feature in general. And updated accordingly when the feature (Functional Spec) changes as well. But that's in in ideal world.
From this I can tell "Build in use, Iteration, Configuration, ..." that you are talking about the Test Reports rather than plans. Why not having a document with a Test Plan. And a separate
e.g. table in this document where you would update (add one line) of the configurations, build, evironment used for testing?
Taking into consideration definition and its a small workaround of the test plan:
The test planning process and the plan itself serve as vehicles for communicating with other members of the project team, testers, peers, managers and other stakeholders. This communication allows the test plan to influence the project team and the project team to influence the test plan, especially in the areas of organization-wide testing policies and motivations; test scope, objectives and critical areas to test; project and product risks, resource considerations and constraints; and the testability of the item under test. You can accomplish this communication through circulation of one or two test plan drafts and through review meetings. Such a draft will include many notes such as the following:
[To Be Determined: Jennifer: Please tell me what the plan is for releasing the test items into the test lab for each cycle of system test execution?]
[Dave - please let me know which version of the test tool will be used for the regression tests of the previous increments.]
As you document the answers to these kinds of questions, the test plan becomes a record of previous discussions and agreements between the testers and the rest of the project team. The test plan also helps us manage change. During early phases of the project, as we gather more information, we revise our plans. As the project evolves and situations change, we adapt our plans. Written test plans give us a baseline against which to measure such revisions and changes. Furthermore, updating the plan at major milestones helps keep testing aligned with project needs. As we run the tests, we make final adjustments to our plans based on the results. You might not have the time - or the energy - to update your test plans every time a variance occurs, as some projects can be quite dynamic. In Chapter 6 [Black, 2001], we describe a simple approach for documenting variances from the test plan that you can implement using a database or spreadsheet. You can include these change records in a periodic test plan update, as part of a test status report, or as part as an end-of-project test summary (c) ISTQB Foundation book
I recommend you to update your existing test plan in order it was possible to see any amendments or corrections made through the whole application development life cycle.
Related
For functional automation we use to create a framework which is reusable for automating application. Is there any way to create Performance testing framework in jmeter. So that we can use same framework for Performance testing of different applications.
Please help if any one knows and provide more information regarding it.
You can consider JMeter as a "framework" which already comes with test elements to build requests via different protocols/transports, applying assertions, generating reports, etc.
It is highly unlikely you will be able to re-use existing script for another application as JMeter acts on protocol level therefore there will be different requests for different applications.
There is a mechanism in JMeter allowing to re-use pieces of test plan as modules so you won't have to duplicate your code, check out Test Fragments and Module Controller, however it is more applicable for a single application.
The only "framework-like" approach I can think of is adding your JMeter tests into continuous integration process so you will have a build step which will execute performance tests and publish reports, basically you will be able to re-use the same test setup and reporting routine and the only thing which will change from application to application will be .jmx test script(s). See JMeter Maven Plugin and/or JMeter Ant Task for more details.
You must first ask yourself, how dynamic is my conversation that I am attempting to replicate. If you have a very stable services API where the exposed external interface is static, but the code to handle it on the back end is changing, then you have a good shot at building something which has a long life.
But, if you are like the majority of web sites in the universe then you are dealing with developers who are always changing something, adding a resource, adding of deleting form values (hidden or not), headers, etc.... In this case you should consider that your scripts are perishable, with a limited life, and you will need to rebuild them at some point.
Having noted the limited lifetime of a piece of code to test a piece of code with a limited lifetime, are there some techniques you can use to insulate yourself? Yes. Rule of thumb is the higher up the stack you go to build your test scripts the more insulated you are from changes under the covers ( assuming the layer you build to is stable ). The trade off is with more of the intelligence under the covers of your test interface, the higher the resource cost for any individual virtual user which then dictates more hosts for test execution and more skew from client side code which can distort the view of what is coming from the server. An example, run a selenium script instead of a base jmeter script. A browser is invoked, you have the benefit of all of the local javascript processing to handle the dynamic changes and your script has a longer life.
I was taking an exam yesterday, and I noticed they asked in which order the following occur (and I'll put the order I deemed it to be here):
Unit Testing (Always write your unit tests first!)
Integration Testing (After you have some code and it works with other code / systems)
Validation Testing (Keep your data in a consistent state and make sure no bad data is input)
User / Acceptance Testing (It's all about the users otherwise why are we building a system in the first place?)
Is this about right?
Personally I think load-testing or database tuning oughta be in there at the end, but it wasn't on the test.
This question doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
For one thing, different people have different definitions of pretty much every kind of testing you have mentioned. For example, in Extreme Programming (XP) Acceptance Tests (while being derived from User Stories) have nothing to do with User Testing, or User Acceptance Testing (UAT). Using the XP definition, Acceptance Testing refers to automated tests that run on a build agent before code makes it anywhere near a user. User Acceptance Testing (UAT) on the other hand, is typically a manual process that happens after a proposed final version has been created and deployed to a UAT environment.
As pointed out in the comments already, Validation Testing is not a common concept with a widely accepted definition. Integration testing also means different things to different people. To some, it is testing that different processes/applications work together (in a UAT environment, for example). For others, it is simply automated tests that involve more that one class i.e. not Unit Tests.
Also, what do you mean by "order"? Do you mean the order in which the tests are written, or the order in which they are run before releasing code to the wild and/or production environment?
In any case, the question is largely irrelevant in the real world because different processes work for different teams. For example, I myself would always write an Acceptance Test before any Unit Tests. Following a test first approach, you always write a Unit Test before modifying a class, yes? So why wouldn't you write an Acceptance Test before modifying the whole system?
If "Acceptance Testing" means anything close to the XP definition of acceptance testing, then I don't think it makes sense for this to come last.
This sounds like the kind of "exam question" that only makes sense in the context of the course that you took before the exam. Without all that information (particularly the definitions of each kind of testing) it is very difficult to provide a useful answer to this question.
Instead of validation testing, System testing is correct word. And Database testing is a part of integration and system testing. Also Load testing will be performed on the phase of system and user acceptance test.
My team is currently building a WebDriver test framework in Ruby. We are looking for a way to generate test completion reports so they can be emailed out, ideally included individual test and test verification point results.
As an example of what I mean when I say test verification points, a test which creates a product could have multiple verification points such as did the product name get created correctly, did the product price get created correctly. If the test completion report could specify which verification point failed it would make assessing failures a lot quicker.
The reports that can be output from the selenium IDE are pretty much what I'm after.
Since you are using Ruby, you can use consider storing your verification points outcomes, test case status etc in a DB such as MySQL or Sqlite. This gives you the ability to perform various analysis on the health of your tests in the past and present. Based on this you can even predict the future trend.
Maybe Allure report and respective RSpec adapter could suit your requirements? This report is rather new and gives you wide range of features like grouping tests by BDD features and stories, saving attachments, parameters and so on.
I'd like to know something, I know that to make your test easier you should use mock during unit testing to only test the component you want, without external dependencies. But at some point, you have to bite the bullet and test classes which interact with your database, files, network, etc.
My main question is: what do you do to test these classes?
I don't feel that installing a database on my CI server is a good practice, but do you have other options?
Should I create another server with other CI tools, with all externals dependencies?
Should I run integration test on my CI as often as my unit tests?
Maybe a full-time person should be in charge to test these components manually? (or in charge to create the test environment and configure the interaction between your class and your external dependency, like editing config files of your application)
I'd like to know how do you do in the real world.
I'd like to know how do you do in the
real world ?
In the real world there isn't a simple prescription about what to do, but there is one guiding truth: you want to catch mistake/bugs/test failures as soon as possible after they are introduced. Let that be your guide; everything else is technique.
A couple common techniques:
Tests running in parallel. This is my preference; I like to have two systems, each running their own instance of CruiseControl* (which I'm a committer for), one running the unit tests with fast feedback (< 5 minutes) while another system runs the integration tests constantly. I like this because it minimizes the delay between when a checkin happens and a system test might catch it. The downside that some people don't like is that you can end up with multiple test failures for the same checkin, both a unit test failure and an integration test failure. I don't find this a major downside in practice.
A life-cycle model where system/integration tests run only after unit tests have passed. There are tools like AnthillPro* that are built around this kind of model and the approach is very popular. In their model they take the artifacts that have passed the unit tests, deploy them to a separate staging server, and then run the system/integration tests there.
If you've more questions about this topic I'd recommend the Continuous Integration and Testing Conference (CITCON) and/or the CITCON mailing list.
There are lots of CI and build|process automation tools out there. These are just representatives of their class of tools.
The approach I've seen taken most often is to run unit tests immediately on checkin, and to run more lengthy integration tests at fixed intervals (possibly on a different server; that's really up to your preference). I've also seen integration tests split into "short-running" integration tests and "long-running" integration tests, which are run at different intervals (the "short-running" tests run every hour, for example, and the "long-running" tests run overnight).
The real goal of any automated testing is to get feedback to developers as quickly as is feasible. With that in mind, you should run integration tests as often as you possibly can. If there's a wide variance in the run length of your integration tests, you should run the quicker integration tests more often, and the slower integration tests less often. How often you run any set of tests in going to depend on how long it takes all the tests to run, and how disruptive the test runs will be to shorter-running tests (including unit tests).
I realize this doesn't answer your entire question, but I hope it gives you some ideas about the scheduling part.
Depending on the actual nature of the integration tests I'd recommend using an embedded database engine which is recreated at least once before any run. This enables tests of different commits to work in parallel and provides a well defined starting point for the tests.
Network services - by definition - can also be installed somewhere else.
Always be very careful though, to keep your CI machine separated from any dev or prod environments.
I do not know what kind of platform you're on, but I use Java. Where I work, we create integration tests in JUnit and inject the proper dependencies using a DI container like Spring. They are run against a real data source, both by the developers themselves (normally a small subset) and the CI server.
How often you run the integration tests depends on how long they take to run, in my opinion. Run them as often as you can. Leave the real person out of this, and let him or her run manual system tests in areas that are difficult or too expensive to automate testing for (for instance: spelling, position of different GUI components). Leave the editing of config files to a machine. Where I work, we have system variables (DEV; TEST and so on) set on the computers, and let the app choose a config file based on that.
When you are doing integration tests with either just your data access layer or the majority of the application stack. What is the best way prevent multiple tests from clashing with each other if they are run on the same database?
Transactions.
What the ruby on rails unit test framework does is this:
Load all fixture data.
For each test:
BEGIN TRANSACTION
# Yield control to user code
ROLLBACK TRANSACTION
End for each
This means that
Any changes your test makes to the database won't affect other threads while it's in-progress
The next test's data isn't polluted by prior tests
This is about a zillion times faster than manually reloading data for each test.
I for one think this is pretty cool
For simple database applications I find using SQLite invaluable. It allows you to have a unique and standalone database for each test.
However it does only work if you're using simple generic SQL functionality or can easily hide the slight differences between SQLite and your production database system behind a class, but I've always found that to be fairly easy in the SQL applications I've developed.
Just to add to Free Wildebeest's answer I have also used HSQLDB to do a similar type testing where each test gets a clean instance of the DB.
I wanted to accept both Free Wildebeest's and Orion Edwards' answers but it would not let me. The reason I wanted to do this is that I'd come to the conclusion that these were the two main ways to do it, but which one to chose depends on the individual case (mostly the size of the database).
Also run the tests at different times, so that they do not impact the performance or validity of each other.
While not as clever as the Rails unit test framework in one of the other answers here, creating distinct data per test or group of tests is another way of doing it. The level of tediousness with this solution depends on the number of test cases you have and how dependant they are on one another. The tediousness will hold true if you have one database per test or group of dependant tests.
When running the test suite, you load the data at the start, run the test suite, unload/compare results making sure the actual result meets the expected result. If not, do the cycle again. Load, run suite, unload/compare.