Video Course: Automated UI Testing in Android

This is the Automated UI Testing in Android video course created by me. It is the continuation of series of courses dedicated to step-by-step UI automation framework development. Just click on the image below for more details.

Video Course: Automated UI Testing in C#

This is the Automated UI Testing in C# video course created by me. It is the continuation of series of courses dedicated to step-by-step UI automation framework development. Just click on the image below for more details.

Video Course: Automated UI Testing in Java

OK. This is the Automated UI Testing in Java video course created by me. Just click on the image below for more details.

Test Automation Best Practices

Introduction

Test automation is not brand new thing. Even more, it's pretty known and quite old part of entire software development process. Thus, a lot of people have good and bad experience with it. As the result, there is some common set of best practices which were formulated in different ways. Different people concentrate on different aspects of test automation. Some of them are concentrating on technical parts while others pay more attention to higher level things. As always, the truth is somewhere in between.

So, what are the best practices in test automation?

For this post I've collected several posts/articles covering this topic (the list of them can be found at the References section of this post) and I'll try to combine them into one common list of practices. Mainly I'll contentrate on the top most UI level automation, however, a lot of practices are fully applicable to any level of automated testing.

WebDriving Test Automation

Introduction

WebDriver shows growing popularity for many years and at least for past 4 years it is number 1 player on the market of web test automation solutions. The growth hasn't been stopped yet. The WebDriver exposes open interface and it's server side API is documented in W3C Standard. Thus, a lot of people can implement their own back-end API and expand technology support. So, WebDriver can become more than another option among web test automation tools list. It may become (if not yet) the most wide spread test automation platform so that the term of UI test automation may be replaced with another term like Web-Driving. In this post I'll describe where the WebDriver solution "web-drives" us to and where are the areas of further growth.

The Future of Test Automation Frameworks

It's always interesting to know the future to be able to react on that properly. It's especially true for the world of technology when every time we get something new, when something which was just a subject of science fiction yesterday becomes observable reality nowadays. Automated testing is not an exception here. We should be able to catch proper trend and to be prepared for that. Actually, our professional growth depends on that. Should we stick to the technologies we use at the moment of should we dig more into some areas which aren't well-developed at the moment but still have big potential? In order to find an answer to that question we need to understand how test automation was evolving, what promising areas are. Based on that we can identify what should we expect next.

So, let's observe test automation frameworks evolution to see how it evolves and where we can grow to.

Sirius C#: adding UI Automation library

Recently we've created code interacting with Win32 and Web. Now it's time to expand the coverage to the .NET area. For this purpose we have dedicated library called UI Automation. This library is provided with .NET framework and contains basic API interacting with window objects. At the same time this library can be used for interaction with the standard Win32 controls, however it can be used as an auxiliary modules to expand the coverage of existing library I created before for interacting with Win32 elements. In this article I will create sample control classes and make some demo showing how it works. Also, in this example I'll take the tab control and create simple tests interacting with it. At this point that would be just stand-alone library but in the future it will be integrated into entire Sirius project.