Blog on Adam Hepner

New Way to Search Testing Terms

Mon, 23 Mar 2020 22:05:00 +0100

The why

I’ve been writing an article about test automation, and wanted to just explain some basic terms. I thought — well, ISTQB has a glossary on their page, I’ll link there. As it turns out, the glossary is horribly and unnecessarily complicated page to use, and it took me good couple minutes to locate a hidden link that leads to a specific term’s permalink.

The what

So I decided to try to do better than that, scraped their search results and published it on a statically generated site here: https://istqb-glossary.page. (disclaimer: at the moment I don’t claim any content on the page, all the terms point to ISTQB Glossary as their canonical links)

Parameterizing Your Robot Framework Tests

Wed, 11 Mar 2020 12:44:17 +0100

This is part 2 of 3 of the Getting Started with Robot Framework Series. You should read the first part, but also the companion article on why parameterizing test cases is important before continuing, as it contains the basis for work done in this article.

If you’re too impatient to read the whole thing (it is quite lengthy!) or just want the juice, here’s the code.

Goal of this installment

After you have worked through this part of the series, you will have

The Why of Test Parameterization

Wed, 11 Mar 2020 12:18:07 +0100

The why of test parametrization

This article dives deeper into reasons and methods for parametrization in test automation. After you have completed it, you will have a deeper understanding of:

What types of test parametrization techniques are available to you
How proper test design works hand in hand with test parametrization
How various approaches toward test design drive usage of different parametrization approaches

The target audience of this article is people already performing test automation activities, but who have yet to feel confident in their approach to the subject. Consider this article a friendly chat over coffee about the relationship between your automated tests and their parameters.

Hugo

Thu, 28 Nov 2019 12:19:18 +0100

This is the first in a series of short posts where I will describe some of the tools that I use daily. There is no particular order to things, just a stream of thought if you will.

So, Hugo. Static site generator, written in Go (one of my favourite programming languages), blazingly fast, easy to use, plays well with Netlify, and Stackbit. What I love about it in particular, is that there’s a single executable provided, that allows you to easily manage your site. You can use it to create reveal.js-style presentations, or even create a simple API.

Thanks to Great Expectations

Tue, 19 Nov 2019 09:56:27 +0100

This is just a quick shout out to the Great Expectations Team (Superconductive Health). I happened to use their library to do some testing a few years ago, as I was part of the “Quality Specialists” team at Otto. Fun days, fun activity.

Basically, I had a bunch of relatively big data files that needed explorative control for issues. I decided to use Jupyter Notebooks, Pandas and Great Expectations for the explorative parts, and just replaced Jupyter Notebooks with pytest for semi-automated verification when doing retests. I remeber work with Great Expectations to be very nice, and even recommended to keep working with it to my replacement colleague (he’s an all-around great guy, very quick learner!) as I switched teams. During the work I submitted a tiny pull request, since I noticed a formatting issue in their documentation.

Fix File Encoding Using Go

Fri, 01 Nov 2019 21:56:41 +0100

This is just a short entry on how to fix file encodings using Go. The reason for it is the following: I currently develop a small test automation augmentation for my customer, and it utilizes a third-party tool. For variuous reasons this third-party tool needs to touch the test data files, and in doing so, it completely garbles those files. After analysis, it turned out, that the files are read in as UTF-8, but interpreted as Windows1252, yet written out again as UTF-8. This leads to very weird situation, where my Umlauts are being converted into gibberisch (like: ü -> Ã¼). Fortunately, I also perform some additional postprocessing, and touch every line in each of those files under question, so I just needed to figure out how to fix the situation.

Running your first test with Robot Framework using docker

Mon, 27 May 2019 08:54:35 +0200

Note: this article had originally been published on the [WonderProxy Blog](Running your first test with Robot Framework using docker) in March 2019.

Intro

This is the first in a series of 3 articles. When you complete them all, you will have a functional and extensible, albeit basic, test automation solution for web applications. This solution will be prepared for inclusion in a CI/CD Pipeline, as well as for local execution.

The complete solution will use Robot Framework as a generic test automation tool, and use Selenium Webdriver to perform very basic browser automation. Two methods of parametrization of test runs will be introduced:

On working with code examples

Tue, 22 Jan 2019 14:40:26 +0100

I have been busy the whole January with a development task for one of my customers. We had settled on delivering the solution with Go, even though my experience with this programming language had been very limited. Decision had been based on of the quality aspects, that is - maintainability. My customer works daily with Go, and very sporadically with other languages. Had I delivered solution in Python, for example, it would be easy for me to deliver, but difficult for them to keep effectively working with the solution afterwards, should our relationship head south at any point in time.

Java Unit Test Organisation Proposition

Wed, 17 Oct 2018 22:58:46 +0200

JUnit5 Evaluation

Wed, 17 Oct 2018 22:58:26 +0200

Starting a New Website with Hugo

Wed, 17 Oct 2018 22:57:31 +0200

Hello World

Wed, 17 Oct 2018 22:03:43 +0200

So, hello everyone. My name is Adam Hepner, and I’ve long been thinking about getting some testing-related publishing done. Usually it’s just life that gets in the way, but I hope that with a little bit of deliberate practice I might get this thing going.

Some things that this blog will be about:

case studies and lessons learned in software testing
Ministry of Testing bloggers’ club challenges
coding and testing deliberate practice
maybe a bit about my parenting
maybe something about my hobbies
probably other things as well.

So, yeah, that’s it for now. Let’s see how long this one lives.