January 30, 2016

January 23, 2016

Adventures in Automation is One Year Old!

Adventures in Automation is now one year old!

What a difference a year makes. When I started this blog a year ago, I was still just another unemployed manual QA Engineer attempting to make the transition to automation. It had been ten years since I studied Software Engineering back in grad school. Could I convince an employer to hire me as an automated tester, if I could prove that I knew my stuff in regards to quality assurance? I had taken a few online courses in WebDriver and posted some code samples to GitHub. Would that be enough?

January 14, 2016

Automate Amazon: Sketch of Possible Data Driven Tests with TestNG

This post is eighth of a series of nine. Need to go back to the beginning?

Background: Our Automation Framework

This section is going to be a little bit different than the others, more experimental.

With previous sections, I wrote how we actually created an automated framework at my workplace... as of December 2015.

With this section, I am going to talk about how you could possibly do data-driven testing with TestNG, without showing a running system. On my local environment, I had some trouble with the setup with running tests in parallel. I can talk about how to modify your @Test, how to set up a testsuite for TestNG.

January 13, 2016

Webinar: Joe Colantonio talks about Test Automation Trends for 2016

Test Automation Trends for 2016 and Beyond

Staying Employable In Changing Times

Sauce Labs Webinar
1/12/2016: 2:00 pm: 
Joe Colantonio, TestTalks.com

Coding isn't the hard part of my role of being a brand-new automation engineer. Although I'm in my forties getting into development for the first time, I am actually doing okay -- in spite of always stressing out about the fact that grad school was a decade ago. I’ve now been writing automation scripts in Java and WebDriver for a year coming this March. Do anything for a year and you start becoming more comfortable with it.

It's keeping up with the latest trends in automated software testing, now that is the hard part!

January 12, 2016

Automate Amazon: Writing a Shopping Cart Test

This post is seventh in a series of nine. Need to go back to the beginning?

Finally! We have the testing framework written!

Now it is time to write a simple test to check to see how we could develop some tests to use this framework.

Let's call our test method in the PurchaseOrderTest class "test_CreatePurchaseForSingleProduct". Our test can be:

1) Go to the Product page, and check the price of a product, such as the mass market edition of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy  
2) Add the Product to an empty Shopping Cart 
3) Verify the price in the Shopping Cart Review page is the same as the product.

January 6, 2016

Automate Amazon: Initializing Login and Cart

This post is sixth of a series of nine. Need to go back to the beginning?

While drafting the tests to handle adding products to the shopping cart, I came across two problems:

  • I kept on on finding that I was logged into my personal Amazon.com account instead of the test account. 
  • From one session to the next, Amazon kept remembering what I had in my shopping cart the test before. 
Before the test is run, we need to initialize the login session, and clear all items found in the cart.

January 4, 2016

Automate Amazon: ProductEnums and ProductObjects

This post is fifth of a series of nine. Need to go back to the beginning?

What good would a shopping cart test be without adding any test products? Let's investigate how to get to the product items on Amazon.

What our Directory Structure Will Look Like


After we store Url and Product locations in Enums, add to the the Actions classes, create a Book pojo to store values of a Book product, and add the ProductsPage page object, our test structure could look like this: