15 categories of tooling for digital test automation

Posted on October 18, 2019October 27, 2023 by SmartQA Community

T Ashok @ash_thiru

Summary

In this article I have tried picture(ise) the landscape of the plethora of tools for testing software which has moved away from just testing to build-test-deploy in a continuous manner. Keeping the interesting visual I have listed the FIFTEEN broad categories of tools that make up the modern digital testing landscape.

Given the plethora of front ends for digital applications of today, from PCs to tablets and mobile phones wth varied form factors, OS and browsers, with varying connection speeds, sometimes uncertain, the integration with many external systems via services with demands on non-functional attributes and the frequent nature of releases has made the challenge of automation and keeping in sync harder.

In this article, I have attempted to picture(ise) the landscape of test tooling with the entity-under-test(EUT) at centre (note that an EUT may be a small component, a subsystem or the complete system) with multiple ways to access it via API, Message/Service or UI on the left, evaluation by various test types at the top, the EUT enclosed in a deployment environment that may be an container/system with various ‘platform choices’. Keeping this as the base I have attempted to enumerate the various activities related to evaluation as inject/stimulate, observe/measure, validate/oracle, log/record and generate mocks as necessary to test for functionality or other non-functional attributes in the larger context of test design, automate, build and deploy on a variety of platforms as necessary.

Test Tools Landscape – 15 Categories of Tools

Using the above picture we have the FIFTEEN categories of tools with some example tools as a table below.

#	Category	Details	Example tools
1	inject/stimulate	Enabling accessing the EUT via API, Service/Message or via UI	xUnit, SoapUI, Postman, Selenium
2	observe/measure	Enabling run time aspects of EUT	Coverage, Resource leaks
3	validate/oracle	Enabling assessment of pass/fail	File comparators, Asserts
4	log/record	Enabling logging data, test information	log utilities, test execution recorders
5	mocks	Provide stubs for yet-to-be developed code	Mockito, Wiremock
6	non-functional test tools	Enable assessment of non-functional attributes	JMeter, SonarCube
7	platforms	Enable testing on different mobile devices with different browsers	pCloudy
8	virtualisation/deployment	Enable visualisation and deployment of code	Jenkins, Tricentis TOSCA
9	mocks/simulators	Enable simulating or mocking large systems	Payment gateway simulators
10	test design	Enable design of test case via specification based testing, BDD	Cucumber, SpecFlow
11	test data generation	Enable large test data generation	Mockaroo, Worksoft
12	build	Enable building of code	Ant, Maven
13	test management	Enable the management of tests	Jira, TestRail, PractiTest
14	unit test	Enable unit testing	xUnit
15	system test	Enable testing of full system via UI	Selenium, TestComplete

#35 – “Great Expectations”

Posted on October 18, 2019November 6, 2023 by SmartQA Community

SmartQA Digest

In today’s world of heightened expectations, what does an organisation and end users expect of IT application team? Zulfikar Deen says end users expect application to work 100%, nothing less, and has a contrarian opinion on DevOps. He also says that management expects to showcase business benefits and hence it is necessary to bake-in metrics of adoption, usage & usability into the application… and much more in the SmartBites video Expectations of end users & management from IT team.

In the ‘beEnriched’ section I outline 25 things I expect of a great tester like

(1) Be disciplined, but stay creative (2) Ask questions, find answers (3) Observe well, see things that are hidden and many more.

“It is easy to make perfect decisions with perfect information. Medicine asks you make perfect decisions with imperfect information” says Siddhartha Mukherjee in the book “The Laws of Medicine: Field Notes from an Uncertain Science”. Check out what this wonderful book is about HERE!

beEnriched

25 things I expect of a great tester

October 24, 2019

Here are 25 things I expect of a great tester like (1) Be disciplined, but stay creative.(2) Ask questions, find answers…

expandMind

Featured image of "The laws of medicine" book

The Laws of Medicine: Field Notes from an Uncertain Science

October 24, 2019

Siddhartha Mukherjee investigates the most perplexing cases of his career ultimately identifying three principles that govern modern medicine.

SmartBites

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||NUGGETS OF LEARNING||

Visual thinking and Sketchnotes- Anuj magazine

Posted on October 18, 2019October 27, 2023 by SmartQA Community

Ashok : As an avid visual thinker who uses Sketchnotes to communicate, please tell us the importance of visual thinking and how it can help us understand/think better and influence people?

Anuj : I think, one of the ways Visual thinking has helped me is to find a way to better stay in the moment and what I mean by that is when we are in the moment, we will be able to appreciate life even more than what it is. So, staying in the moment in one of the big benefits. While I don’t claim to be a big one, every artist seeks inspiration from life happening around them and the quest of seeking that inspiration itself is one that lets you live that moment better than in a condition without that, so that is one.

The second way visual thinking I believe has helped me is – One of my online friends is Tanmay Vora, a very good Sketchnote artist. One of the blogs that he wrote and that stayed with me, talks about one of the principles he follows – to consume less and create more. In essence, what he means by that is, people with all the revolution which has happened around smart phones are always consuming content. We can blame apps for it – in a way they have been designed to create that stickiness, but we are always in the consumption mode. What happens if we start eating lot of food? It shows up on our body. Ironically, consuming lot of content does not show up as visibly in our minds. We can feel our minds getting bloated up, getting overwhelmed with lot of stuff, but you got to catch those signals. So, in order to balance it out, one of the principles of consuming less and creating more comes into picture. How it helps the visual thinker in me is that if I read stuff, I try to restrict myself to reading good stuff, and whatever I read I have a kind of pact with myself that I will create something out of that, be it a blog, a sketch or some other consumable form. That really creates balance because you are not holding up information for too long and getting it to stale in your mind without it being put to the right kind of use.

Third way visual thinking has helped me is – I will tell you an instance where I had organised one of the sessions on quantum computing. As complex a subject as that is in today’s times, it was equally important for people to figure out how to explain it simple. So, one of the things that I had set myself to do in that session was to Sketchnote the session live. Eventually, it turned out to be a good summary and in doing so, I realised that Sketchnoting is helping me actively listen to the speaker. What I mean by active listening is that again I am not consuming the content for the sake of consuming the content. I am creating something out of it and also actively removing the noise out of the whole experience of listening. You can’t write each and every word in a Sketchnote, but you can write the key points and summarise it. I did present it to the speaker after the event. So, bringing in the ‘intention’ in the listening is one of the key traits that I learnt.

Overall, the main areas where visual thinking has helped me, is to be more aware, be more present in situations and listen intently and balancing that continuum of creation and consumption which is important.

Ashok: So what you are saying is it does help you certainly be more mindful, absorb better and obviously assimilate it and keep up with the most important things so to speak and do it very continually along with the person who is doing his job.

Anuj: I would like to add how will it help QA professionals.More often QA professionals find themselves in a situation where the bug reports, unfortunately still are considered as the key output. In absence of any innovation happening in creating new bug reports, they are again thought of as one of the predictable outputs from the profession. What if you create a Sketchnote out of a bug report? I think that might help people look into your bug with more interest and getting more motivated to fix them.

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