September 20 – Jim Holmes – Functional Testing from Acceptance Criteria to Zip Files

Join us Thursday, September 20, 2012 for a great night of hands-on geek fun and learning. Free food and socializing starts at 6:00 PM, and the lab begins at 6:30 PM. Our meetings are held at 11 Lea Avenue, Nashville, TN (directions).

Lab: Functional Testing from Acceptance Criteria to Zip Files

This session lays out the fundamentals of working with automated functional testing. We’ll start with discussing how important clear acceptance criteria are, then do practical implementations of functional tests dealing with common situations such as input validation, AJAX delays, and yes, downloading Zip files. Along the way you’ll pick up critical concepts like dealing with a web page’s DOM, element locators, and tools to help you interact with these. You’ll also learn UI automation programming concepts like the Page Object Pattern, implicit and explicit waits, and modularizing your tests.

This session focuses primarily on automating web tests, but many of the same concepts can be applied to other UI environments too. Demos and labs will be in C# using WebDriver, but we’ll also discuss Watir, MS Web Test, and Telerik’s Test Studio. You’ll also learn how Jeff Morgan’s page_objects gem might be a great fit for your environment if you’re working with Ruby. We’ll briefly cover acceptance tools like Fitness and Cucumber, and how they can bring great value to your process, too.

You’ll leave this session having learned how to deal with functional testing from A to Z. You’ll also learn critical factors for success in keeping your tests running quickly, and avoiding brittle tests that break frequently.

About Jim Holmes

Father. Husband. Geek. Veteran. Around 25 years IT experience. Co-author of “Windows Developer Power Tools.” Coffee Roaster. MVP for C#. Chief Cat Herder of the CodeMash Conference. Diabetic. Runner. Liked 5th grade so much he did it twice. One-time setter, middle blocker, and weakside hitter. Blogger (http://FrazzledDad.com). Evangelist for Telerik’s Test Studio, an awesome set of tools to help teams deliver better software. Big fan of naps. Find him on Twitter as @aJimHolmes.