• JulyMeetingTwoThousandEight

Automated Testing With a Purpose

July 9 2008, 7:00 - 10:00 pm

Come learn techniques for clearer automated QA tests and share your feedback as Christian and Kay present a dry run of their upcoming Agile 2008 conference tutorial.

We'll present the first 90 minutes of our tutorial, which introduces writing tests in FitNesse and discusses five techniques for clearer tests.

Requirements

• Please bring your laptop with Java development environment (Java 5 or greater) if you have one. If not, don't worry, there will be someone to pair with.

Objectives

• Learn five techniques for writing more understandable tests.
• Create stronger, more useful tests with less effort.
• Build test suites that are valuable to non-testers.

• Gain experience writing and running tests in FitNesse (Java and Groovy).

• Understand the benefits of FIT/FitNesse table-based approach to testing.

Course Outline

1. Introduction (15 min)
   • Kay and Christian intros
   • Purpose of session
   • Attendee intros (What would you like to get out of the session?)
2. Exercise 1 (10 min)

   • Brief overview of FitNesse

   • Hook-up: Run FitNesse tests

3. Exercise 2 (25 min)
   • Story about tests that were thrown away.
   • Attendee stories.
   • You are the new test team - Decide which tests your team will keep and which you will throw away. For each decision, explain the reason on your flipchart (or piece of paper).
   • Debrief. What were your reasons?
4. Lecture – Test Fragrances (10 min)
   • Clearly stated test objective
   • Consistent domain language
   • Abstraction
   • Declarative – Say "what" not "how"
   • Data driven
5. Exercise 3 (5 min)
   • Add or fix a test objective
6. Exercise 4 (20 min)
   • Introduce Action and Column fixture

   • Convert action fixture test into column fixture & data driven

7. Agile wrap-up – Ah-has (5 min)

See also

• Link to our Agile 2008 tutorial description: http://xputah.org/wikinew/JulyMeetingTwoThousandEight