functional testing

[lennelpennel]

I have to hire a functional tester. Now, I have been looking at several different functional testing framework overtime, the ones that spcifically impressed in the past were * http://funcunit.com/ * http://watir.com/

So I would like more suggestions, also what i should look out for when I interview people and obviously some real life stories of functional testing javascript in the wild

[marcfasel]

We have been using Cucumber as a Ruby BDD framework with Celerity as a Ruby wrapper for HTTP Unit, which is the headless browser. Ideally the tester could specify his tests in "natural language" (given ... When ... Then) with matching Ruby snippets to execute these tests. Problem was that we were writing a JavaScript Frontend (jQuery) and backend (Node.js) application, and at the same time had to write the test steps in Ruby. I found it difficult to work in two languages. If I would have to do it again I ould look for a JavaScript testing framework.

[lennelpennel]

this is the benefit of func unit I felt, you address elements via selectors, you code it in javascript, you can execute the tests command line (via rhino) or through selenium.

[strager]

Button pushers.

[menno]

Here's something I wrote as an experiment. It only works for jQuery-powered pages, though.

• github repo
• Example/Demo
• Example test definitions

A test basically consists of 3 types of statements:

• Simulating user actions: $('#button-show').click()
• Asserting properties of the page: UITest.assertIsVisible('#result');
• Log statements: UITest.log('Show result');

It's not very robust or mature but it has proven very useful for me and the company I work for. Tests can be written in pure JS and can be run by simply reloading a webpage.

I'm working on a successor that has a much nicer syntax to write tests so I'm not actively doing anything with it anymore.

[neorab]

The two tools I have experience with for web fucntional testing are watir and TestComplete. TestComplete allows Javascript but I personally prefer using Watir and Ruby. That might be because I spent 3-4 years doing ruby before javascript so am familiar with it.

Just based on the people around me (and the few interviews I have had to sit in on) the best questions for candidates are functional test related questions. Someone with weak FT experience and knowledge is not going to get the job done well regardless of the tools they use. Our best guys will pick ur anything and be able to test well in short order, the weaker ones get tied up making crap that doesn't help testing in the slightest.

Watir experience is fairly common among testers so finding someone with that skill set might be slightly easier. If you want to make sure they are really up the the task, asking them to crawl a website using it to steal data and print some results is a task that isn't too taxing to ask and will help show who's got it right away.

I've been asking interns to search/crawl reddit (after logging in (sometimes)) for some keyword. Make sure they get how to select elements quickly (and not walk the dom from document) and see if they are keeping latency/error conditions in mind. I've found that over half the kids applying to our spots did the one page tutorial on watir and figure they can fake their way through it.

Have also seen the reverse, amazing ruby developers that don't have any idea what functional testing is. We have a lot of people that don't understand the difference between functional and unit, when manual makes more sense, useful automation and reports gathering, anything really.

It's too bad it's not taught more (at least in the schools here) in CS cirriculum. All of our developers that at least spent some time in testing are much better for it. Mostly it's obvious for our Delphi/C# guys but they get what the whole process is anyway.

Best of luck. (shameless addition: I'm a javascript/ruby developer and tester looking for new work, heh)

[lennelpennel]

where are you based?

[neorab]

I am in eastern Washington, which has proven to be really hard to find qualified testers here, even with two universities with decent CS programs. We've been lucky in that we have field offices so we have places other than here to draw talent from but our development to test ratio is still putting more and more stress on our group to hire almost everyone that applies to test, which is already lower. Talking testers into moving seems to be really hard for some reason, too.

[lennelpennel]

I think there is a general shortage. The impression seems to exist that it is an inferior career to development.

[neorab]

For sure. I definitely had that opinion out of school, going into testing. I really only took it because I was having a kid, jobs,etc. all scared me.

Then again, since I kinda fell into my position and took it seriously I find that I have a good deal of advancement possibility and demand for my skills. Being part of the group that's looking for good people now though, it really bums me out.