Chris McMahon's Blog

Managing test data is one of the most difficult parts of good testing practice, but I think that managing test data receives surprisingly little attention from the testing community. Here are a few approaches that I think are useful to consider for both automated testing and for exploratory testing. Antipattern: Do Not Create Test Data In The UI But first I want to point out what I think is a mistake that many testers make. When you are ready to test a new feature or you are ready to do a regression test, or you are ready to demonstrate some aspect of the system, the data you need to work with should already be in place for you to use. Having to create test data from scratch before meaningful testing begins is an anti-pattern (and a waste of time!), whether for automated testing or for exploratory testing. Create Test Data With An API This is usually my favorite approach to managing test data. Considering this scenario in the context of an automated test, I usually will have ...

Wait In modern web applications, elements on the page may come into existence as a result of actions that the user may take, or they may disappear from the page as a result of actions that the user may take. In order to test modern web applications in the browser, it is rare that tests do not have to wait for some condition or another to be true or false before the test can proceed properly. In general, there are two kinds of waiting in automated browser tests. In the language of Watir, these are "wait_until" and "wait_while". If you are not using Watir, you have probably already implemented similar methods in your own framework. My experience is that wait_until type methods are more prevalent than wait_while type methods. Your test needs to wait until a field is available to fill in, then it needs to wait until the "Save" button is enabled after filling in the field. Your test needs to wait until a modal dialog appears in order to dismiss it, the...