How We Build Quality Software at uSwitch.com

Published November 25th, 2009 Under Functional Testing | Leave a Comment

This video provides an experience report on how we build quality software at uSwitch.com. Around 9 months ago the development team shifted from having a separate QA team to adopting a whole-team approach for building and delivering software with quality baked in. This talk explains why we made this shift, provide an insight into how we achieved it from a people and process point of view and delve into tooling. It includes:
- Why testing along the production line is better than testing end-of-cycle.
- How we make sure we get thorough acceptance criteria up front, before we start development.
- How we automate execution of acceptance criteria with cucumber and watir.
- How we run these continuously in TeamCity.
- Why we stopped using QTP and Selenium.
- How our developers learnt to think like testers.
- Why we stopped using the words ‘tester’ and ‘testing’.
- The importance of BDD for writing testable code.
- How kanban principles help radiate information on development and provide tracking and reporting on quality.
- Peripheral activities that help us continuously release quickly and confidently.

http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/agile-testing/how-we-build-quality-software-at-uswitch-com

Utilising WATiR to Test in an Agile Environment

Published August 19th, 2009 Under Functional Testing | Leave a Comment

In this session Wadud will talk about and demonstrate how he utilised WATiR – a Ruby testing framework for Internet Explorer – to aide the testing of web applications in an agile environment. Wadud will briefly talk about the testing requirements that needed to be addressed, and the introduction of a new language to a team of .NET developers. Finally the majority of the session will focus on the creation of the WATiR Scripting Language; a DSL for WATiR that greatly increased productivity for the entire team. More information about this can be found at http://wsl.xqoob.com

http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/agile-testing/utilising-watir-to-test-in-an-agile-environment

Cucumber and Watir 101

Published May 7th, 2009 Under Software Testing | Leave a Comment

Dave Hoover demonstrates how to use Watir with Cucumber. Actually, he uses his own library SafariWatir, but you could easily swap it with Watir, FireWatir, ChromeWatir or Celerity. Cucumber lets software development teams describe how software should behave in plain text. The text is written in a business-readable domain-specific language and serves as documentation, automated tests and development-aid – all rolled into one format.   Sorry – no sound.