Desktop automation tools

Talking to one of my colleagues today. He asked me about testing desktop applications. As someone who predates the Internet, testing desktop applications was not foreign to me. However I realized that many testers today have only worked on web or mobile device applications.

Testing things like Microsoft Word, Notepad, Calendar or Eclipse isn't something many testers have done.

You wouldn't use something like Selenium, cucumber or Watir to test a desktop application.

So where would you go to find desktop application test tools? The first place I look is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_GUI_testing_tools. At this time this page notes:

• AutoIt: http://www.autoitscript.com/site/autoit/ (free)
• IBM/Rational Functional Tester: http://www-03.ibm.com/software/products/en/functional (commercial)
• Quality First Software: http://www.qfs.de/en/index.html (commercial)
• Sikuli: http://www.sikuli.org/ (free)
• SilkTest: http://www.borland.com/products/silktest/ (commercial)
• Test Automation FX: http://www.testautomationfx.com/ (commercial)
• Telerik TestStudio: http://www.telerik.com/teststudio (commercial)

In addition to these links I would also check out:

• http://www.ministryoftesting.com/resources/software-testing-tools/
• http://sourceforge.net/directory/development/development-testing/freshness:recently-updated/

The first site has a wide range of links and it currently actively maintained. Unfortunately, it has more links for web and mobile testing but there are some desktop application tools listed.

The second link is to sourceforge. It will take you to the recently updated testing links. It includes open source applications for all sorts of testing. You can remove the "recently-updated" filter and see more but I usually restrict myself to recently updated tools. 

If the tool is for desktop testing and it has not been recently updated, there is a strong chance it does not work with modern applications or a current operating system. The older the tool the higher the risk it will not work on Windows 7 or 8, Mac OS X 10.8 or 10.9.

If you enter in a search term, like "testing" then a whole set of menus will appear below the search term and you can narrow things down even further. For example, after entering "testing" into the search text box I can select OS to be "Mac" and category "Quality Assurance".

I can also clear all the filters and search for things which might help narrow it down in different ways. For example, if I know how to program Java and I think I might want to add to the open source tool then I can filter for things with Programming Language "Java". Additionally, if the desktop application is written using Swing and Java I could search for Programming Language "Java", Category "Testing" then enter "swing". From the results I find jrobot (http://jayrobot.sourceforge.net/) and gtt (GUI Test Tool; http://gtt.sourceforge.net/). 

It is also worth just poking around sourceforge and keeping a mental note about things you find. This is because you'll be surprised what you stumble. For example, JFCUnit is a good tool for testing Java Swing applications but it didn't come with JFCUnit (http://jfcunit.sourceforge.net/).

What is agile testing?

There are books on agile testing and there are people who claim to be agile testers (as opposed to??). But what does this actually mean?

In recent years I have worked at companies/clients who claim to be 'agile' or I hear of companies who say they have a prescription for 'being' agile.

But agile is a concept and a way of doing software development. To me it is almost as if, when you start creating lists or writing down a checklist of activities you need to do in order to be agile is right when you stop being agile.

Doing agile software development is constantly thinking about how you can be better, faster, more efficient in what you are doing to get your software to the people who can use it or who will be affected by it.

I started being agile probably around 1998. Actually I was probably trying to be agile before then but around that time was when I started working with other like mind individuals.

The first thing I started noticing was that the developer to tester ratio caused testing to be the bottleneck in the software development life cycle. So I had to start thinking about how I can reduce risk, test more with less effort.

One possible aid was automating tests. Writing automation was not faster than manually testing an application but if I need to test the application on Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 98 Second Edition, Windows ME, Windows NT4 and Windows 2000 then I could test it 6 times, I could test it fully once and some limited testing 5 times (what I was doing before automation) or I could take 3 times longer automating it (than manually testing it once) and run it 6 times.

Before test automation I would test one platform completely then pick the highest priority tests and run them on the other 5 platforms. This made testing faster but because I didn't test everything on every platform it increased risk.

Writing automation and running it 6 times maintained the risk but allowed me to test everything faster. It was this last idea that made test automation the best way to do all this repetitive testing.

I wasn't agile because I was writing test automation. I wrote test automation because I wanted to be agile. So if you write test automation it doesn't make you agile. If your test automation makes you able to test more without increasing risk then you are being agile.

Now I have seen people who write automation which takes days or even weeks to run. This is not faster than manual testing in some cases. Or running the tests and analysing the results might take longer than manually testing everything. It is automated but this is not agile.

What if we have an emergency fix? Someone finds a defect in production code. They figure out what is wrong and fix it. I am then tasked with testing the new build before we deploy to production. I could run the entire test suite on the new build. Or I could use the source control system to find out the difference between the production code and the fix. I could examine the source code, understand what has changed and manually test only what I determine would be effected by the fix.

The best part is that the fix might expose a new problem that the test automation isn't even testing for but my brain should quickly see the potential danger. It is faster to do this focused testing and I probably have a better chance of spotting new problems an automation test suite would not detect. This is agile, faster and reduce risk. I could run the test suite as well but if the tests are still running when we are ready to go to production, we could release to production and decide if it needed to be rolled back should something in the test suite fail. Getting to production versus the likelihood the tests will fail. I'm not the gatekeeper trying to stop the code from going to production. I am part of the development team trying to improve the quality of the code in production. It is no longer a black and white issue. If it is better than what is in production but still not perfect, we should still release it.

How about testing the right thing and understand what the right thing REALLY is. Old school testing was when you are given a list of requirements and you simple checked off the requirements were met. This does not mean you implemented a good, high quality piece of software.

As part of agile software development, we have stories. Everyone needs to understand what the details of a software are. The developer needs to understand the story so they can implement the requirements (or acceptance criteria). A tester needs to understand the story so they can confirm the requirements have been implemented correctly. The key is that the developer, tester, business analyst and possibly the product owner all need to confirm with each other what the requirements are before they are ready. We are essentially testing the requirements before we test they have been met.

Cam we go even further? At one company I was testing software for a retail store. It was a store I shopped at. I could have claimed to be representative of the customer because I was a customer. But was I really the typical customer? I was not the typical customer. How did I determine this? I would go to retail stores after work and just observe other customers. I would go to different stores on different days and at different times. Where people on their smart phones? Did anyone use the computer terminals at the entrance? I found the typical customer was much older or a mom with kids. I saw people with ads and coupons printed out on a 8.5" x 11" paper.

I would chat with people in the store. I didn't tell them who I was. I asked them how they found out about sales, where did they get coupons, did other stores do stuff they wished this store did on the website, etc. I found if people thought they could get you implementing their personal agenda or they were being surveyed that their answers weren't honest. If I was just a chatty shopper in the store I feel I got a more honest response.

So next time you are thinking about being an agile tester, do something different. Visit the customer in their natural environment. Visit different stores and see if different neighbourhoods have different customers or does the store always attract the same sort of person.

Test Driven Development

I've read a lot for and a lot against Test Driven Development (TDD) but I don't every remember something TDD has really helped me with. If you write a test then write the code which makes the test pass the end result is a piece of code which demonstrates how the application code works. I have used a number of open source applications and like every library/framework/application I have used the documentation ends up being way out of date. But if you are writing tests for all the features you add (before or after you write the code) you are essentially creating examples of how to use the library/framework/application. So even with the documentation falling out of date, so long as the code has a good base of unit tests, you can figure out how it works. I find this helpful in multiple ways. When I'm automating I tend to use tools like Selenium. Whenever I need to use a new feature of Selenium I can look at the documentation but ultimate, the unit tests for the framework tell me how it actually behaves. Additionally, the applications I am testing are written by people who understand TDD and have a good set of unit tests for each application. So I find it easy to under how new features are implemented by looking at the unit test for the application I am testing. For example, Selenium has a TakesScreenshot class. The source for it would be found at:

https://code.google.com/p/selenium/source/browse/java/client/src/org/openqa/selenium/TakesScreenshot.java

So if I want to see the tests for it, change 'src' to 'test' and change 'TakesScreenshot.java' to 'TakesScreenshotTest.java' for a full URL of:

https://code.google.com/p/selenium/source/browse/java/client/test/org/openqa/selenium/TakesScreenshotTest.java

When I look at this latter file I see many examples of how to use the TakesScreenshot class.

WebDriverWait versus FluentWait

The WebDriver code waits for the page to load but today we have dynamic websites using things like angularjs and Ajax. WebDriver does not wait for the javascript to execute. So you might have something like:

<a href="http://{{env}}.company.com/foo/bar.html">{{env}}</a>

When the page loads, javascript runs and converts {{env}} to some defined value. So on the test environment {{env}} might convert to test, on stage it converts to stage and on production it converts to www. However, WebDriver will not wait for the javascript to make the substitution.  The end result is clicking the element will cause WebDriver to go to "{{env}}.company.com" when we really wanted it to wait and go to "www.company.com".

So how do we make WebDriver wait for the variable to be updated by javascript?

The answer is WebDriverWait or FluentWait. Below are examples of how you can use WebDriverWait and FluentWait to wait for the javascript to finish:

import com.google.common.base.Function;
import com.google.common.base.Predicate;
import org.junit.After;
import org.junit.Before;
import org.junit.Test;
import org.openqa.selenium.*;
import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.remote.DesiredCapabilities;
import org.openqa.selenium.support.ui.*;
import java.util.Arrays;
import static java.util.concurrent.TimeUnit.*;
import static org.junit.Assert.assertFalse;

public class TestingFluentWaitAndWebDriverWait {
  WebDriver driver;
  WebElement button;

  @Before
  public void setUp() {
    System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver", "/Users/ThoughtWorks/IdeaProjects/SeleniumTesting/chromedriver2");
    DesiredCapabilities dc = DesiredCapabilities.chrome();
    dc.setCapability("driver.switches", Arrays.asList("--start-maximized"));
    driver = new ChromeDriver(dc);
    driver.manage().window().maximize();
    driver.get("http://www.google.com");
    driver.findElement(By.cssSelector("#gbqfq")).sendKeys("\"Darrell Grainger\"");
    button = driver.findElement(By.cssSelector("#gbqfb"));
  }

  @Test
  public void testWebDriverWait() {
    new WebDriverWait(driver, 3).until(ExpectedConditions.visibilityOf(button)).click();
    assertMyBlogLinkExists();
  }

  @Test
  public void testFluentWait() {
    new FluentWait<WebElement>(button).withTimeout(3, SECONDS)
        .pollingEvery(100, MILLISECONDS)
        .until(new Function<WebElement, Boolean>() {
          public Boolean apply(WebElement w) {
            return w.isDisplayed();
          }
        });
    button.click();
    assertMyBlogLinkExists();
  }

  @Test
  public void testFluentWaitPredicate() {
    new FluentWait<WebElement>(button).withTimeout(3, SECONDS)
        .pollingEvery(100, MILLISECONDS)
        .until(new Predicate<WebElement>() {
          public boolean apply(WebElement w) {
            return w.isDisplayed();
          }
        });
    button.click();
    assertMyBlogLinkExists();
  }

  private void assertMyBlogLinkExists() {
    final String linkText = "QA & Testing";
    try {
    new FluentWait<WebDriver>(driver).withTimeout(3, SECONDS)
        .pollingEvery(100, MILLISECONDS)
        .ignoring(NoSuchElementException.class)
        .until(new Function<WebDriver, Boolean>() {
          public Boolean apply(WebDriver d) {
            WebElement link = d.findElement(By.linkText(linkText));
            return link.isDisplayed();
          }
        });
    } catch(TimeoutException te) {
      assertFalse(String.format("Timeout waiting for link: '%s'", linkText), true);
    }
  }

  @After
  public void tearDown() {
    if(driver != null)
    driver.quit();
  }
}


All three tests will result in the same outcome.

Creating good locators

I am constantly seeing people look for tools which will create locators. I think a lot of us starting by using Firebug to examine the DOM and select locators. With Chrome I can now right-click on an element and select Inspect Element.

Now of this really helps figure out what is a good locator. So people are still looking for a tool which will tell them the best locator for an element.

If I go to http://www.google.com and inspect the Google Search button I will see:

<button class="gbqfba" aria-label="Google Search" id="gbqfba" name="btnK">
<span id="gbqfsa">Google Search</span>
</button>

We might think that the Selenium locator By.cssSelector("#gbqfba") might be a good locator. One definition of a good locator is that it needs to be consistent and unique. For years the Google Search button has had the id attribute of gbqfba. So it is consistent. It is an id and according to the HTML standard there can be only one element for each id value. So it will be unique.

But is it a good locator? I will argue that it is not a good locator. If I had the following Selenium code:

driver.findElement(By.cssSelector("#gbqfq")).sendKeys("Darrell Grainger");
driver.findElement(By.cssSelector("#gbqfba")).click();
assertThat(driver.findElement(By.xpath("//a[contains(text(),'Testing')]")).getText(), startsWith("QA"));

it will run consistently over years. But what happens if something changes and I need to refactor this code? The first line is sending my name to something with id='gbqfq', it is clicking something with id='gbqfba'. What if we changed the HTML to have:

<button class="gbqfba" aria-label="Google Search" id="gbqfba" data-qa='search button'>
<span id="gbqfsa" data-qa='text for search button'>Google Search</span>
</button>

then the Selenium code could read:

driver.findElement(By.cssSelector("[data-qa='search input box']")).sendKeys("Darrell Grainger");
driver.findElement(By.cssSelector("[data-qa='search button']")).click();
assertThat(driver.findElement(By.cssSelector("[data-qa='first search result']")).getText(), startsWith("QA"));

Now if I'm looking at the code and have no knowledge of the website being automated, it should be easy for me to figure out that the first element is the search input box, the second element is the search button and the last element is the first search result.

Essentially, by adding the data-qa attribute the elements we are trying to locate:

• easier to locate the element
• easier to read the code when running/refactoring it
• make the code less brittle

A possible complaint would be that adding these elements could interfere with other elements on the page. The whole 'data-' syntax is a standard for HTML5. If there is a change someone is going to use data-qa then you can use data-foo where foo is the name of your application or your company name or your name.

Another possibility is that it is not unique. It only has to be unique to the given page. If the value is incredibly descriptive then it should be unique. You make the value of data-qa reflect the information necessary for someone testing the application manually then it should be unique. If it is not unique then how would a manual tester find THE element if its description was not unique?

I also considered adding more data to the page would increase what the CSS and XPath engines had to index more information. So I tried loading up page with these attributes added and could not measure any noticeable impact on the performance.

The only other concern I can image is if I add too much data or too verbose descriptions on the data-qa values then I could increase the amount of data transmitted. More bytes transmitted might impact performance of the web page. Wasn't able to see any significant impact in this area but your mileage might vary. So this is something to watch out for.

Forcing a remote computer to restart

Occasionally I find I need to reboot a remote computer. In my current situation the remote computer is Windows XP and accessed via VNC. However the VNC server will occasionally stop responding.

If the machine's IP address was 1.2.3.4 and I try:

shutdown /m 1.2.3.4 /r /t 1

it does not reboot the computer. Assuming there is nothing to save on the computer and I just want it to reboot and restart the services, I am happy to just kill processes until I hit something critical and it reboots.

However, if you hit the RPC process, you will be unable to send the command to kill more processes. So you have to be careful about which process you are killing. What I have found is killing the lsass.exe process will cause the computer to reboot. So issuing:

taskkill /im "lsass.exe" /s 1.2.3.4 /f

Will kill the lsass.exe proccess on the remote machine and force a reboot of that computer. The reboot will not be immediate. A 30 second countdown will happen as the system warns you a critical process was killed. However it will reboot the computer after the countdown is complete.

Browser statistics

A lot of discussion goes into browser statistics. Whenever a company is creating a new web application they need to decide which browsers will be supported and their order of importance.

Years ago it was a given that Internet Explorer was the #1 browser. Just the shear volume of Windows users and lack of serious competition in that area made Internet Explorer the dominant browser.

Then along came Firefox and later Chrome. Additionally, Mac Desktop is becoming a large enough market that Safari is worth considering.

So how do we decide which browsers we should support and what order we should rank them in?

There are many sites which give statistics on browser usage:

W3 SchoolsStatCounterW3 CounterClickyNetMarketShareWikiMedia

and probably a whole lot more to check. If we look at the different sites we can see some radically different numbers. Some claim Chrome is close to 60% of the market. Others have Chrome around 30% of the market.

Why the big difference? Different sites will gather statistics on different people. The W3 Schools site is very popular among programmers and software testers. I tend to like Chrome because it has the built-in Inspect feature and other helpful development tools. Firefox is okay when you install Firebug or other tools but often we want to test with a clean browser and don't have these tools available.

Starting with Internet Explorer 8 it came with development tools. The tools in Internet Explorer 9 are better but nothing as good as the tools in Firefox or Chrome. So Chrome and then Firefox are going to be the browser of choice for programmers and software testers.

Not surprisingly, W3 Schools is the site which claims Chrome is almost 60% of the market. But it will be biased towards power users, programmers and testers. My mother doesn't use a computer. If she did it would be a Windows 7 with Internet Explorer 11 or a Mac with Safari 6.1.

So which statistics site you select depends on your target audience. You don't want to use the statistics from W3 Schools if your target audience is my mom.

What if you have a website and you are going to be updating it or adding another website with the same target audience? Then you have been hopefully gathering statistics on your existing website. Statistics from your existing website will tell you exactly who your users are. If you statistics say that 97% of your users are using Internet Explorer 6 then you need to support Internet Explorer 6. You could make it painless to upgrade your existing user base to a new version of the same browser but odds are it is safer to just support what your users are using.

The only time I would say you might not want to completely follow the statistics on an existing website would be if you are attempting to grow your market and know the new customer base is going to be a different type of user. Let's say that my user base is traditionally Internet Explorer users but I want to start targeting Mac users. I want to make sure that I don't sacrifice existing users for the new user base. So I will continue to value the Internet Explorer users but I want to start looking at statistics for when the operating system is Mac OS X. If I drill down to just Mac OS X users, which is the dominate browser?

In addition to which browser there is also the resolution for the display. This tends to be a little easier to decide if we are talking desktop. You pick the small display which is widely supported. Originally, I would design a website so it looked good on 640x480. Then the average display was 800x600. Later we would start seeing wide displays like 1440x900. I found it easiest to set a minimum size that would be supported. So you don't want so many things on a menu that the menu is longer than say 600 pixels high if you supported 800x600. We can use tools to resize the browser to the different sizes and make sure things still look good. This is easy to do on pretty much any desktop today.

Back in the days of EGA and VGA the number of colours you would support was an issue but today it isn't really something people worry about any more.

This is how I generally recommend clients decide on which desktop browsers to support. It does not really address the idea of mobile browsers. This is an area which is still in flux. I see a lot of different mobile browsers. My own personal experience has been updating my browser can make it more unstable. So if I have a browser which runs on my device I'll stick with it. However, if I get a new device I tend to find the newer browsers come with it and run better than old browsers. So you should be seeing a wider range of browsers on mobile devices than on desktops. Additionally, mobile devices include smart phones and tablets. There are full size tablets, mini tablets, large smart phones, medium smart phones and small smart phones. The different resolutions can vary much more than desktop devices.

Additionally, I cannot take a large device and resize the browser to small sizes. The idea of a window on a desktop doesn't exist on many mobile devices. So testing on the different resolutions is a major concern. Fortunately, with emulators you can run a software emulated version of a device and check that the website displays properly on it. Or you can use features of our existing browser to pretend to be a specific mobile device. This will change the size and User-Agent information to make your web application display as if it was getting rendered on a mobile device. Again, Chrome Inspect has some built-in features in this area which are quite helpful. They should not replace emulators or even better actual devices when doing system testing.

Ideally, in a test lab I will have all the machine with the largest display we want to support. I will then use a virtual computer player like Virtual PC, Parallels, VMware, etc. to emulate all the other operating systems. A Mac works really well because you can use it to run Mac browsers, a virtual PC like Parallels or Fusion to run Windows, Linux and Solaris x86, XCode to emulate iOS devices and Eclipse or IDEA to emulate Android devices.

If the client runs mostly Microsoft products and Mac isn't a concern then you can use Virtual PC on a Windows 7 device to run Windows XP and Windows 7 virtual machines for free.

For virtualizing all the Windows machines right now you can go to http://www.modern.ie/en-us/virtualization-tools#downloads to download virtual machines for Windows XP, Windows 7 and Windows 8. Everthing from Internet Explorer 6 to Internet Explorer 11.