Java Testing Weekly 12 / 2016

There are many software development blogs out there, but many of them don't publish testing articles on a regular basis.

Also, I have noticed that some software developers don't read blogs written by software testers.

That is a shame because I think that we can learn a lot from them.

That is why I decided to create a newsletter that shares the best testing articles which I found during the last week.

Let's get started.

Technical Stuff

  • Robot Framework Tutorial 2016 – Selenium2Library as a drop-in replacement for SeleniumLibrary is the fourth part of Codecentric's Robot Framework tutorial, and it helps you to replace the old (and not officially supported) SeleniumLibrary with the Selenium2Library. It also analyzes the differences of these versions which helps you to evaluate the effort that is required to fix your existing tests after the update.
  • Unit Testing With Mock Objects describes why you should use mock objects, explains which objects you should mock, and helps you to create mock objects with Mockito. It is a basic tutorial, but this is not a bad thing. If you have no experience from mock objects, and you want to investigate this subject, this blog post is a good place to start.

The Really Valuable Stuff

  • Do I Need UX Testing specifies the term User Experience (UX) and describes why you should do UX testing. Many people think that UX testing is the same thing as user interface testing, and it is important to understand that the latter is just a subset of the former. I know that this might get you out of your comfort zone, but if you want to proud of your work, you should add UX testing into your toolkit.
  • Giving Up on TDD is a dialogue between a developer and her mentor. The developer has decided to give up on TDD and her mentor tries to convince her that she is making a mistake. I know that everyone doesn't appreciate Uncle Bob's writing style, but he actually makes some good points about learning new skills. I think it is natural that learning a new skill takes time and effort, and it is inevitable that you will hit a few bumps on the road. That is no reason to give up on something (unless you don't really want to learn it).
  • How Agile Changes Testing (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3) describes what kind of an effect agile software development has to testing. It describes how agile software development has changed tester's job and explains how you can manage the expectations of your customers. This an important topic because I have noticed that many software development teams claim be agile, and yet, they have no testers. I hope that these blog posts help you to understand agile testing and see the benefits of having a tester (or testers) in your team.
  • Minimum Viable Automation identifies the problems caused by a test automation strategy that is set in stone and describes how you can solve these problems by applying the concept of minimum viable product to your testing efforts. The ideas described in this blog post aren't revolutionary, but the problem is that too few developers are actually using them.
  • Test Automation Survey 2016 describes the results of an online test automation survey that got 644 answers. It was quite interesting to find out that large (100+ employees) use pretty much the same tools as small (1-100 employees) companies. If you want to find out what these tools are, you should take a look at the results of this survey.
  • Three practices for creating readable test code describe how you can write more readable code by using fluent assertion libraries, page objects, and using the given/when/then structure. This is an important topic because writing automated tests is just a beginning. Sadly, I suspect that it is quite common to write a lot of automated tests without paying any attention to this. This is sad because typically poorly written tests are hard to read and maintain. This means that developers start to believe that automated testing is not worth it because it takes too much time.

It's Time for Feedback

Because I want to make this newsletter worth your time, I am asking you to help me make it better.

P.S. If you want to make sure that you don't ever miss Java Testing Weekly, you should subscribe my newsletter.

2 comments… add one
  • chaithra Mar 22, 2016 @ 9:25

    Hi Petri,
    Very good blogs to read for anyone in software delivery.

    I really eager to look for more blog post.
    I am an passionate test developer who manage/lead software tester(TD) in EMC Bangalore.

    Thanks,
    Chaithra

    • Petri Mar 22, 2016 @ 21:53

      Hi Chaithra,

      Thank you for your kind words. I really appreciate them.

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