Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

Consider the following: You go to the Apple Store to pick up the latest iPhone. You get home and turn it on, only to find that the screen is defective, the buttons aren’t working, and every one of the built-in apps is glitching. Thanks to QA tools, this is an extremely unlikely scenario. Before the iPhone reaches your hands, both its hardware and software have been tested repeatedly by a Quality Assurance (QA) team.

Selenium IDE is a popular open-source tool for recording and running automated browser tests. You can use it to interact with a browser the way a human would, doing things like navigating to URLs, filling in forms, and clicking on links and buttons. You can also use “assertions” to verify things are working as expected, like checking that elements are present, text is present, inputs contain certain values, et cetera.

Quality Assurance testers play an important role in verifying that company software maintains its functionality and reliability. Because the world of software testing is an expansive one, QA testers should equip themselves with an understanding of which types of software testing are most relevant to their daily tasks. With so many different software testing types, it can be overwhelming knowing where to start.

End-to-end testing (E2E) is an important part of the software development process, serving as a comprehensive way to verify that applications and systems work properly not only in the testing enviroment, but also in real-life scenarios. It provides a level of assurance that your application will correctly exhibit behavior from start to finish.

Here’s a scenario: You’re a QA tester building automated tests for a new online email app. One test case requires you to confirm that the email reply button is working correctly. The challenge is that the email thread updates dynamically without changing its web address URL, complicating the process by limiting the effectiveness of using CSS selectors alone. So what else can you do? The answer: It’s time to bring in XPath selectors.

While continuous integration is a common practice for most software development teams, the stateful nature of WordPress makes it more challenging to set up. For our open source WordPress plugin, we wanted to integrate our standard build and test process for every pull request using CircleCI. CircleCI is a cloud-based CI/CD platform that streamlines the development process for creating, testing, and deploying code changes.

Usability is critical for the success of any website or web application. To make sure your web-based project is bug-free, you need to run UI tests, many of which can—and should—be automated. Doing so lets you detect issues like bugs, slow loading times, or poor responsiveness so you can fix them before they make a bad impression on users. But while you can find a lot of UI testing tools online, this abundance of options makes it challenging to choose the right UI tool for your project.

I love this quote, though I’m not quite sure if “Jan Houtema” is a real person. It may be a Paul Graham pseudonym… But in any case, yes, change breaks brittle things and one of the challenges of automated browser testing is to mitigate that effect as much as possible while you design tests for an ever-changing application.

When we initially started building our test recorder, we needed a way to validate the id attributes being used on the page. We would sometimes capture an id attribute in a recording, only to find that it failed when we used it in a test, because it didn’t meet specification. For instance, sometimes websites would use an id with a number in front, like this: That is technically invalid, at least in the HTML4 specification.

This post originally appeared on the Build Blog by ThinkApps. View the original post by Runscope’s VP of Developer Relations, Neil Mansilla. So you’ve designed, built and launched your app. Before you pat yourself on the back and move on to the next project, your work isn’t quite done. In order for your app to gain adoption, consistently delight users and be successful for the long haul, you need to put certain systems and workflows in place.