A Smattering of Selenium #141

Its -12 Celsius plus windchill out. Why the heck is the office air conditioning on. Feel like I need a Mr. Rogers cardigan or something.

• Caret Navigation in Web Applications starts slow and then hurts your brain while reminding you that this automation thing isn’t easy.
• I don’t know NUnit or TeamCity so don’t know if Using TeamCity and NUnit to Start WebServer, Run Selenium Tests and Stop WebServer is useful or just a rehash of common knowledge. But here you are anyways.
• paratest-selenium is another parallel phpunit solution. I really want an official one.
• Why Everyone (Eventually) Hates (or Leaves) Maven is not Maven bashing [he says so in the 3rd last paragraph].
• Writing Testable Frontend Javascript Part 1 – Anti-patterns and their fixes — looking to carve out a niche for the next couple years for yourself? This is it. And Canvas [which is JS...]
• The SeleniumCamp 2013 program is out. Of course, its in Russian but…
• Writing a Neo4j Puppet module for fun and profit is I think how a lot of trial stuff is going to be distributed. And Puppet is fun.
• Have I mentioned that this automation thing is hard? No? How about What is the Execution Context & Stack in JavaScript?. Still think its easy?
• Automated Testing: From “Testing” Activity to “Development” Activity is the sort of epiphany you will see more and more I think. Unsure whether this is a good, bad or just factual trend.
• About building a framework? Its in! How to make a basic test framework in C#

A Smattering of Selenium #140

Buckets!

• I suspect that scanner-backed-by-selenium belongs in the ‘with great power comes great responsibility’ bucket
• ios-driver is in the ‘wouldn’t it be nice if Apple provided this’ bucket
• Selenium WebDriver utility for determining when page has finished rendering is in the ‘ADF specific’ bucket’
• I suspect JSErrorCollector is in the ‘already indirectly linked to’ bucket. If not then its in the ‘FF only’ bucket
• Using a business readable language for browser automation is in the ‘bdd/atdd hype’ bucket. But is also in Haskell which is kinda interesting for an Se article
• reality is expensive: a better way of thinking about mock objects – Yup. ‘Fake bucket implementation’ bucket.
• The bits in Android’s tablet quality page would be even nicer if Android wasn’t in the ‘openly hostile to automate’ bucket.
• Data Attributes Rock – As Both Css and Javascript Know Them — HTML5′s data attributes are firmly in the ‘raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens’ bucket.
• Stop Using Story Points gets added to the ‘read the comments as well’ bucket. Also the ‘this is how we accrue automation debt, kids’ bucket.
• Large scale automation with jenkins from Kohsuke Kawaguchi

  . Oh, and the ‘woohoo! I already do this stuff’ bucket.

A Smattering of Selenium #139

Posting from the past into the future. Or something… (its a scheduled post).

• webdriverjs-with-jasmine appears appropriately named since it claims to be A standalone (includes standalone Selenium server (30Mo) + includes Jasmine) working example of a test with WebDriverJS and Jasmine.
• Similar to the above, but with Drupal and Behat – Classic
• How I[he] send notifications to the build breakers. using twillio
• On Code Review comes from the Food For Thought department
• Orc is a model driven orchestration tool for the deployment of application clusters. Sounds cool.
• upgrading hacked dependencies — doncha hate when you do this?
• WAVE will tell you have well you do against their accessibility heuristics. Its no guarantee of course, but its a start.
• And why is it no guarantee? See Things I learned by pretending to be blind for a week.
• Dear SpeakerDeck; your embed method doesn’t work with WordPress. So here is a link to So, You Want to Be a Front-End Engineer?
• I was bored and experimenting with Py.Test fixtures here — and then got schooled in the comment section on how to actually do it.

A Smattering of Selenium #138

<insert snark here>

• Debugging For Testers — they don’t teach this in testing school. Actually, there is a testing school…
• A million times this!! That’s not BDD, that’s just Cucumber
• Faster Websites: Crash Course on Web Performance — all three hours of video
• Continuous Integration of iOS Projects using Jenkins, CocoaPods, and Kiwi
• Clearing IE’s Caches – Not as simple as it appears is another one of those things that gives Jim headaches.
• Speaking of things that give Jim headaches; Revisiting Native Events in the IE Driver. Fun, fun, fun.
• We’re Doing It Wrong! What DevOps Needs to Learn in Order to Scale Up. is pretty good, but wow I dislike this slide system.
• why GNU grep is fast – The key to making programs fast is to make them do practically nothing
• Squash feels kinda like a wrapper about ‘git blame’ coupled with a log monitor, but still an interesting concept.
• Writing faster WebDriver tests isn’t necessary making scripts faster as it is about a clever abuse of the JS Executor

A Smattering of Selenium #137

Whoops, missed a couple days… ah well.

• MOAR ELEMENTS!!! the <main> element
• Dependency injection != Inversion of Control is useful reading. And the Waffle example is pretty funny.
• Not sure yet how I feel about this feature in the page-object gem.
  
• Waiting for an application to be fully loaded has some more examples of using a ‘proper’ [not implicit] waiting strategy.
• Most of us are not using Se for HVAT, but knowing the terminology, etc. can’t hurt – An Overview of High Volume Automated Testing
• The Exceptional Beauty of Doom 3’s Source Code – An ode to code indeed.
• Visual Studio considered Harmful. Or any other tool in your toolchain. You should be able to swap any bit up for one of similar functionality. The number of Eclipse programmers absolutely dwarfs the number of Java programmers.
• Centralized Selenium Logging with Graylog — alright, this is pretty trick.
• chrome-har-capturer uses Chrome’s remote debugging port to build a HAR file. Even works for SPDY traffic I believe.
• Opening a new terminal tab in OSX(Snow Leopard) with the opening terminal windows directory path – woah! AppleScript!

A Smattering of Selenium #136

Someone go back to my past self and punch him for thinking that starting to get in shape was a good idea. OMGCANTMOVE.

• .NET Goes Immutable seems interesting. But I don’t really speak C# so it could very well be boring and uninteresting.
• Shadow DOM 101 is another part of HTML5 that makes me think this web automation stuff has a very limited life span. Between this and Canvas… ugh.
• Using WebDriver to automatically check for JavaScript errors on every page is something I have been considering adding to my frameworks…
• Have I mentioned how much Canvas worries me? Snow in canvas land is an interesting post on debugging/improving performance on an little canvas app
• And in a similar vein, Why moving elements with translate() is better than pos:abs top/left
• I want to say that I’ve already linked to this, but I need it for a potential project so I’m linking it again – Modifying Python’s SimpleHTTPServer to accept directory aliases
• As a framework vendor I’m a bit worried about linking to Why Frameworks?, but there you have it.
• It both worries me, and impresses me, when people start needing to do Linux TCP/IP Tuning for Scalability
• Living in the cloud? Go read An Epic TripAdvisor Update: Why Not Run On The Cloud? The Grand Experiment. Now. The last link can wait.
• Understanding HEAD, HTTP/204 and HTTP/206 — What? You mean that there is more to HTTP than 200 and 404?

A Smattering of Selenium #135

Three in a row … of course, these are the easy three.

• Build, test and deploy Firefox OS apps for $0 (or any other currency that I don’t know how to emit)
• Ruby on Rails … in Bash. Because they can. Bash on Balls
• All you need to know about CSS Transitions except how the hell we are going to synchronize on them. Well, kinda does, but this is going to hurt.
• Speed Up Web Testing with a Caching Proxy has a speed-up trick I hadn’t thought of yet. And it also further complicates the moving parts in automation.
• Rails SQL injection vulnerability: hold your horses, here are the facts – I think every vulnerability should have a write-up like this.
• I hope I never feel the need to investigate an operator the way PHP equal operator == does.
• Now, investigating runners is something I’ve had to do a couple times. Reading MiniTest – part one, part two, part three, part four, part five, wrap up
• Using macros to create custom example groups in RSpec
• Hamcrest Quick Reference. Print it out and pin it to your wall.
• This. Is. Awesome. Mozpol – Provisioning Pandas

A Smattering of Selenium #134

Hrm. Office is closed until Monday, but everyone is in. Very confusing…

• One reason I have heard people say they don’t use cloud instances is they are afraid they will just sit around idle when not needed. Behind the clouds: how RelEng do Firefox builds on AWS has some useful scripts to find and teardown machines.
• Page Weight Matters is a fun little insight into how/why YouTube shed some of its heft. And a reminder that what we need is more stuff coming out of bandwidth starved regions since we have forgotten how to program efficiently in North America / Europe.
• Usetrace looks like the newest player in the Selenium-in-the-cloud space. Seems to use the Python bindings as the scripting language and host the scripts too.
• Did you know that you can modify the Se Server’s Grid functionality with plugins? Neither did I — or at least I don’t think I did… Here is a tutorial and another example.
• The interesting part of Whose bug is this anyway?!? is ‘Your computer is broken’ bit. Oh, and make sure that build machine is updated to what your developers are running…
• Modeling How Programmers Read Code is just cool.
• Speaking of reading code; Code Reading. I wonder if you gave this to a novice programmer if they would approach the above link differently.
• PhantomJS 1.8 “Blue Winter Rose” got lots of twitter love. As it should have.
• Cooperative multitasking using coroutines (in PHP!) is, I think, pretty awesome just by the my inability to fully grok what is going on. I also have no idea how to use this for automation purposes, but it seems like there should be some usage for it somewhere…
• So You Want to Write Tests is more mindset than code … but code has always been the easy part anyways.

A Smattering of Selenium #133

Since today is the start of ‘find a new contract’ I guess I don’t have an excuse to miss these for the next week or so.

(Oh, and Happy New Year, etc.)

• This is snark, but just makes me laugh given the hype machine around ATDD/BDD;
  

  AS an angry userI WANT TO punch the developer in the faceSO THAT I CAN punch the developer in the face.

  — Kristopher Johnson (@OldManKris) December 4, 2012

• Alright, this is also snark, but Why not make your URLs responsive? is an interesting ‘how would I automate this?’ question
• Adoption Of Exploratory Testing And Test Automation On The Rise is kinda sales-y [which is fine given the context], but if you swap in ‘Selenium IDE’ or ‘Selenium Builder’ for ‘TestStudio’ then you have the case for those parts of the suite.
• web++ is a single file webserver — in c++
• From 15 hours to 15 seconds: reducing a crushing build time is pretty good, though some very obvious developer tendencies sneaking in. The quick fix at the end, run the build entirely on the tmpfs in-memory file system seems in intriguing as well.
• Your periodic reminder that Simply Writing Tests Is Not Test Driven Development
• Javascript & HTML5 Game Engines Libraries – 51 Examples — and all will need their own unique automation efforts. Welcome to the JS Executor future. Honest, those aren’t thumbscrews you see on the counter over there. Why are you looking at the counter?!?!
• HTML5 canvas performance: Drawing circles — timing is something we’ll also have to care about in HTML5 apps.
• Falsehoods programmers believe about build systems. Yes.
• And I thought my brain hurt before reading display: none;. I was wrong.

A Smattering of Selenium #132

2.27.0 is now out which means you can close the browser tab that points to the old Firefox installers.

• Not Providing an HTML Page? Think of the Kittens! is important to remember. We want to fix your bugs. Help us help you!
• The HTML5 download attribute is another bit I am not looking forward to have to automate
• Refactoring to Improve Testability – what can I say? I like experiential posts
• Oh how it pains me to suggest that SikuliWebDriver looks mighty cool
• Page Visibility API Support in Opera 12.10. Again, not something I am looking forward to automating.
• Ah brogrammers. DO NOT SEND “REGISTSER BITCH” TO GUESTS
• Ruby script to change the desktop background periodically on Mac is just cool. And you will notice that even though they could have spun up a browser to do this, it wasn’t the right tool for the task. Consider that the next time you want to light up a browser.
• So what that it is over two months old, but PHPUnit 3.7 lists some relevant information about the release
• SeleniumScreenSnapper seems pretty clever. Almost steal worthy in fact
• Supercharging PHP MySQL applications using the best API is useful when testing your app in general, but also remember that if you are trusting what the browser is telling you and not verifying it with the database you are asking for a world of hurt