Agile Testing with Lisa Crispin

There are so many test frameworks, drivers and other tools out there I want to try. For example, Selenesse has been at the top of my list of things to try for months (and I’ll get to it sometime soon!) However, I couldn’t resist the offer from Pekka Klarck, one of the Robot Framework contributors, to give me a live one-on-one demo of Robot Framework a couple of weeks ago. This weekend, I finally had time to try to write my first test (really, to finish up a test that Pekka had started for me).

My first test is below. I always struggle mightily when I learn some new tool or language, and this was no exception. (Apparently my more-geeky friends also struggle with new things, but they don’t whine publicly about it like I do). The user doc for RF leaves a bit to be desired from a non-programmer perspective. However, they are actively improving it. With much help from Pekka (and suggestions from many in the Twitterverse who also use RF), I have gotten over this first beginner hump, I can see lots of possibilities.

You can write RF tests in various formats, including HTML tables. I like the plain text format, because to me, simple is good. It makes the tests more amenable to version control, because you can easily diff versions to see what has changed. If you try that with html table tests you’ll have lots of noise.

I love the flexibility of this tool. I am trying it out with the RF Selenium libraries, but you can use it with a variety of tools, including tools to test non-Web apps such as Java Swing. There’s a lot of potential there.

I like the fact that you can define whatever “keywords” you want, so you can create your own domain-specific language and the test can document itself and the code that it is testing. The inline-documentation aspect is also one of my favorite features of FitNesse.

My team is pretty happy with our current tools: FitNesse for testing behind the GUI, Canoo WebTest for GUI regression tests, and Ruby/Watir scripts to help with exploratory testing. We’ve long wanted to try Selenium, though, and RF would give us an easy way to do that. We’re always experimenting, and an experiment with RF will tell us whether there’s value in adopting it.

For myself, I think RF will be useful in my public presentations and classes. I’m always looking for ways to teach good test automation design, and I think I can do this fairly easily with RF. I’ve seen Dale Emery and Elisabeth Hendrickson do good demos with RF. I’ve also seen Antony Marcano, Andy Palmer and Gokjo Adzic do good demos with FitNesse, so I’m not saying one is better for this purpose than the other!

Here’s my test. I also copied it in below, though the spacing might be wacky there. I put comments in for myself that might help you, too. Download the RF-Selenium library demo and try it for yourself. If you have any issues I am glad to try to help. It would help me learn, too!

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lisas_first_test.txt

# new line and 2 spaces are cell delimiters.
# the asterisks have to start in the first col
# Look at the selenium keywords in http://code.google.com/p/robotframework-seleniumlibrary/wiki/LibraryDocumentation
# Look at the quick start guide for more http://code.google.com/p/robotframework/wiki/QuickStartGuide
Actually you don’t even need the # if you type up above the first table. Tables can be in any order. ‘*** Test Cases***’ is an example of a table.
Run it with ./rundemo.py lisas_first_test.txt
To start the server for the app under test manually, python httpyserver.py start

*** Test Cases ***

invalid account
navigate to the login page
type in username  invalid
type in password  xxx
click submit
verify the invalid account error message

*** Keywords ***

navigate to the login page
log  hello, world!
open browser  ${LOGIN PAGE}  ${BROWSER}
title should be  Login Page
${title} =  Get Title
should start with  ${title}  Login

type in username  [Arguments]  ${username}
input text  username_field  ${username}

type in password  [Arguments]  ${password}
input text  password_field  ${password}

click submit
Click Button  login_button

verify the invalid account error message
Title should be  Error Page
Page should contain  Invalid user name and/or password

*** Settings ***
Library  SeleniumLibrary
Test Teardown     close browser

*** Variable ***
${LOGIN PAGE}   http://localhost:7272
${BROWSER}      firefox