Month: February 2017

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Google Mobile Friendly With Perfecto and Quantum

Guest Blog Post by Amir Rozenberg, Senior Director of Product Management, Perfecto

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Google recently announced “Mobile First Indexing”, from Google:

To make our results more useful, we’ve begun experiments to make our index mobile-first. Although our search index will continue to be a single index of websites and apps, our algorithms will eventually primarily use the mobile version of a site’s content to rank pages from that site, to understand structured data, and to show snippets from those pages in our results (Source).

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More recently they made the Google Mobile-Friendly tool and guidelines available. A very nice interactive version is available here, and images at the bottom of the thread, while there’s also an API (which, thanks to Google, can allow users to exercise first before they code). Google also offers code snippets in several languages.

Notes:

  • Google takes a URL and renders it. If you run multiple executions in parallel there’s no point in sending the same URL from every execution because the result would be the same
  • Google returns basically “MOBILE_FRIENDLY” or not. Suggest to set the assert on that
  • The current API differs from the UI such that it only provides the results for Mobile friendly (and the UI gives also mobile and web page speed). Hopefully, Google adds that to the response 😉
  • This will probably not work for internal pages as Google probably doesn’t have a site-to-site secure connection with your network.

 

For developers and testers who do not have time, testing mobile friendliness repeatedly probably will simply not happen. That’s why I integrated Google Mobile-Friendly API into Quantum:

  • Added 2 Gherkin commands
// If you navigate directly to this page
Then I check mobileFriendly URL "http://www.nfl.com"
// If you got to this page through clicks
Then I check mobileFriendly current URL
  • Added the Gherkin command support (GoogleMobileFriendlyStepsDefs.java)
  • And the script example is pretty simple:
@Web
Feature: NFL validate

  @SimpleValidation
  Scenario: Validate NFL
    Given I open browser to webpage "http://www.nfl.com"
    Then I check mobileFriendly current URL
    Then I check mobileFriendly URL "http://www.nfl.com"
    Then I wait "5" seconds to see the text "video"

 

That’s it. Next steps:

 

Ideas for future improvement:

  • You can automate the validation such that every click would trigger a check with Google behind the scenes.

Just for fun, some more screenshots for detailed analysis for NFL.com:

 

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screen-shot-2017-02-13-at-5-34-23-pm

 

 

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Criteria’s for Choosing The Right Open-Source Test Automation Tools

I presented last night at a local Boston meetup hosted by BlazeMeter a session together with my colleague Amir Rozenberg.

The subject was the shift from legacy to open-source frameworks, the motivations behind and also the challenges of adopting open-source without a clear strategy especially in the digital space that includes 3 layers:

  1. Open source connectivity to a Lab
  2. Open-source and its test coverage capabilities (e.g. Can open-source framework support system level, visual analysis, real environment settings and more)
  3. open-source reporting and analysis capabilities.

During the session, Amir also presented an open-source BDD/Cucumber based test framework called Quantum (http://projectquantom.io)

Full presentation slides can be found here:

Happy Reading

Eran & Amir

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Model-Based Testing and Test Impact Analysis

In my previous blogs and over the years, I already stated how complicated, demanding and challenging is the mobile space, therefore it seems obvious that there needs to be a structured method of building test automation and meeting test coverage goals for mobile apps.

While there are various tools and techniques, in this blog I would like to focus on a methodology that has been around for a while but was never adopted in a serious and scalable way by organizations due to the fact that it is extremely hard to accomplish, there are no sufficient tools out there that support it when it comes to non-proprietary open-source tools and more.

First things first, let’s define what is a Model-Based testing

Model-based testing (MBT) is an application for designing and optionally executing artifacts to perform software testing or system testing. Models can be used to represent the desired behavior of a System Under Test (SUT), or to represent testing strategies and a test environment.

mbt

Fig 1: MBT workflow example. Source: Wikipedia

In the context of mobile, if we think about an end-user workflow with an application it will usually start with a Login to the app, performing an action, going back, performing a secondary action and often even a 3rd action based on the previous output of the 2nd. Complex Ha

The importance of modeling a mobile application serves few business goals:

  1. App release velocity
  2. App testing coverage (use cases)
  3. App test automation coverage (%)
  4. Overall app quality
  5. Cross-team synchronization (Dev, Test, Business)

 

As already covered in an old blog  I wrote, mobile apps would behave differently, and support different functionality based on the platform they are running (E.g., not every iOS device support both Touch ID and/or 3D Touch gesture). Therefore, being able to not only model the app and generate the right test cases but also to match these tests across the different platforms can be a key to achieving many of the 1-5 goals above.

In the market, today there are various commercial tools that can assist in MBT like CA Agile Requirement Designer, Tricentis Tosca, and others.

Looking at an example provided by one of the commercial vendors in the market (Tricentis), it can show a common workflow around MBT. A team aims to test an application; therefore, they would scan it using the MBT tool to “learn” its use cases, capabilities, and other artifacts so they can stack these into a common repository that can serve the team to build test automation.

tosca

Fig 2: Tricentis Tosca MBTA tool

In Fig 2., Tricentis examines a web page to learn its entire options, objects, and other data related items. Once the app is scanned, it can be easily converted into a flow diagram that can serve as the basis for test automation scenarios.

With the above goals in mind, it is important to understand that having an MBT tool that serves the automation team is a good thing, but only if it increases the team efficiency, its release velocity, and the overall test automation coverage. If the output of such tool would be a long list of test cases that either does not cover the most important user flows, or it includes many duplicates than this wouldn’t serve the purpose of MBT but rather will delay existing processes, and add unnecessary work to teams that are already under pressure.

In addition to the above commercial tools, there is an older but free tool that allows Android MBT with robotium called MobiGuitar. This tool not just offers MBT capabilities but also code coverage driven by the generated test scripts.

A best practice in that regards would be to probably use an MBT tool that can generate all the application related artifacts that include the app object repository, the full set of use cases, and allow all of that to be exported to leading open-source test automation frameworks like Selenium, Appium, and others.

Mobile Specific MBT – Best Practices and Examples

Drilling down into a workflow that CA would recommend around MBT would look as follows – In reality, the below is easier said than done for a Mobile App compared to Web and Desktop:

  1. The business analysts will create the story using tools like CA Agile Requirement Designer or such (see below more examples)
  2. The story is then passed to an ALM tool (e.g.: CA Agile Central [formerly Rally], Jira, etc.) for project tracking
  3. Teams use the MBT tools to collaborate
    1. The automation engineer adds the automation code snippets to the nodes where needed or adds additional nodes for automation.
    2. The programmer updates the model for technical specs or more technical details.
    3. The Test Data engineer assigns test data to the model
  4. Changes to the story are synchronized with the ALM Tool
  5. Test cases are synchronized with the ALM Tool
  6. The programmer completes coding
  7. The code is promoted from Dev to QA
  8. Testing begins
    1. The tester uses the test cases with test data from MBT tools for manual test case execution
    2. The automation scripts with test data are executed for functional and regression testing

To learn more about efficient MBT solutions, practices please refer to these sources: