Skip to main content

Agile Testing - A defense system from my team stories


Today, I love to tell you about my team story about testing. That started from no testing to extreme testing system.

 eXtreme Feedback Devices (https://jenkins.io/blog/2013/09/05/extreme-feedback-lamp-switch-gear-style/)
Guess what? That is really an exciting idea from the picture(no?). These devices can work with Jenkins. Whenever they build a Jenkins job, this system notifies instantly to developers the status of their system.


That is not 100% related to testing but somehow it is like our testing mindset. Because, in my team,  we call our testing system is a defense system :). There is no doubt that it is very hard for us to remember all features of our applications even which is developed for a long time. Like a document, tests help us make sure no features will be lost after changes such as adding new more features, fixing bugs or refactoring code.

That was the reason why we cared much about testing. It was really important for developing apps. Back then, we thought about how to test effectively.
Testing pyramid
The "testing pyramid" points out that basing on the efforts, the agility of detecting bugs and the running time, we chose what types of tests should be more concern. We mainly followed the above priority, unit test was the most concern.

Now, I am going to share about our problems that we already met and what our strategies were in order to overcome them.

Unit Test

We maintained several very old projects that contains no tests. We got a lot of bugs and we tried to fix them but the problem was no one knows these bugs will happen again or not. It looked like a non-stop loop for fixing bugs. Terrible!
Oh no!
That was a reason why we used unit test to make sure we wouldn't see the bugs already fixed again. Day by day, we practiced TDD and tried to improve our unit test a lot. We also used Hamcrest to make our testing code more readable.

Integration Test

In our application architecture, we called integration such as controller which was a place that contained the combination from business logic (be handled at Service layers), managing database (be handled at DAO layers) and user interfaces (UI) events.

Issue with mock at integration layer
With unit test, it makes sense that a layer can mock a tested layer. For example, DAOs is already covered and Services layer just mocks DAOs layer and just focus on testing its logic. We used Mockito to archive that.

However, some time our applications still work wrong even our unit tests are passed. Why? We figured out that the problem came from mocking when we integration a lot of things together. For instances, we have Services call DAOs, we mock DAOs when we test Services. Because we always assume the behavior of DAOs work correctly, we will soon get unexpected problems in Services if the implementation of DAOs is changed.

This issue led us to find a new type of test is more reasonable rather than unit test. We call it integration test. Here we simulated a real environment and work with real data connection instead of mocking.

GUI Test

We used Selenium in order to test behaviors of GUI such as GUI elements' validation and interaction. We faced to a problem that it takes time too much when running in multi-browsers manually. We found Sauce Labs can help us. It can work with Jenkins so we can automatically running our test as we want on cross platforms.

Selenium Grid (http://www.seleniumframework.com/intermediate-tutorial/what-is-selenium-grid/)
However, we met another problems with Sauce Labs that is very hard to match our Selenium browser drivers, our operation system (Window, Linux) versions with Sauce Labs provided options. We found a better way to go that is Selenium Grid. With Selenium Grid, we freely configure our browsers drivers and operation system versions, it has not only the same ability to Sauce Labs but also run faster thanks to local connection. Moreover, it is free. :)

 Summary

Tests are very important for us to develop our applications. It likes our document and defense system. We should try to test as much as possible to reduce bugs and improve our products quality.

Yeah, that is all from my story. What about yours?
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Multiple Inheritance of State and Implementation

Today, I was just curious about why an enum can not extend anything else. I took a look on the Oracle document here , and I found the answer is below: "All enums implicitly extend java.lang.Enum. Because a class can only extend one parent (see Declaring Classes), the Java language does not support multiple inheritance of state (see Multiple Inheritance of State, Implementation, and Type), and therefore an enum cannot extend anything else." I have been learned of it before. But, wait a sec...! Why Java does not support multiple inheritance of state? Since I have worked with other programming languages like C++, I was able to make a class extend some other classes. The short answer is to avoid the issues of multiple inheritance of state .  I wonder if other programming languages have these below terms but Java does. Multiple inheritance of state It is the ability to inherit fields from multiple classes. There is a problem and Java avoids it. "For exa...
Post a Comment
Read more

Monday vhandit #2

  Introduction to OpenLDAP directory service "A directory is a specialized database specially designed for searching and browsing, in addition to supporting basic lookup and update functions" A directory service can be local, providing a restricted context; or global, providing service to a much broader context. Curlie is a good example of a directory service. LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) is a protocol for accessing directory services , specifically X.500-based directory services. OpenLDAP is an open-source implementation of LDAP. Writing system software: code comments I have read Clean Code (by Uncle Bob) and I thought that I should void comments since the code it explains its implementation itself. That is right but not always true. In this post, the author categorized the comments into 9 types. Only "trivial comments" and "backup comments" are the ones that should be avoided. I myself agree with "writing good comments is harder tha...
Post a Comment
Read more

Building Axon.ivy Projects on Bitbucket Pipelines

Read me  if you don't know what Axon.ivy (Ivy) is. Motivation -  Ivy projects are designed to be built on a continuous integration (CI) server like Jenkins - Today, Bitbucket supports for CI with Bitbucket Pipelines - We're using Bitbucket. Then, why not? It must be very cool and convenient for us if we can centralize our CI and VCS (version control system) tools in one place. Here is an approach We have to use a maven plugin called project-build-plugin  to build ivy projects. This plugin requires an instance of Ivy engine during building time. Bitbucket Pipelines allows us to specify our own docker image as a build environment. What we need to do  is to prepare our docker image with needed stuffs such as JDK, Maven, Ivy engine, etc. Step 1. Prepare Docker images For testing purpose, I already created two docker images: Maven and Axon.ivy engine. They are now available on Docker Hub This image for Maven using Oracle JDK 8 This image for Axon.iv...
Post a Comment
Read more

Using Drools to Dynamically Manipulate Metadata of JSF Components

The post is just an approach to change metadata (e.g maxlength, required, etc) of JSF components (e.g. inputText, selectOneMenue, etc) by Drools. Project structure Tools being used Java version 1.8.0_131 Apache Maven 3.5.0 Apache Tomcat 8.0.16 Don't forget to configure your confidential information on  these following files: pom.xml, settings.xml (Maven) and tomcat-users.xml (Tomcat). For example: Source code https://github.com/vnnvanhuong/java_lab/tree/master/jsfdrools
Post a Comment
Read more

Monday vhandit #1

This is the first post in a series of articles called "Monday vhandit". You can go to the original post by clicking on each head title. Character encodings: essential concepts This article points out why Unicode matters and differentiates among concepts: character sets, coded character set (unit is code points), and character encoding. Explained from First Principles: the Internet The very structural and well-explained article contains almost concepts of the Internet. I really appreciated the author's effort put on that post. Dev Community - DevDojo I just joined this community. DevDojo is really a developer-oriented platform. It is very nice, easy, fast, and sufficient to write (Markdown supported) and search for a post. The best of it, you also have a personal blog for your posts at "<your_username>.devdojo.com". My username is vnnvanhuong Everything you need to know about HTTP security headers A good collection of HTTP security-related headers. Moreover...
Post a Comment
Read more