Slide 1: Teaching Scripting to Testers (bret@pettichord.com, www.pettichord.com) (marick@testing.com, www.testing.com) Workshop on Teaching Software Testing, Melbourne, Florida, February 2004 Copyright © 2004 Bret Pettichord & Brian Marick. Permission to reproduce granted under the TestingEducation.com license. Bret Pettichord Brian Marick
Slide 2: Agenda Tutorial Structure Creating an Ad Hoc Lab Tutorial Materials Tutorial Evolution Who Benefits? Changes Planned Ruby and Our Toolkit 2
Slide 3: Agenda for One-Day Tutorial A series of hands-on exercises: Manual Testing Using IRB and IE Controller Writing Scripts Web Services For each exercise: 2. Show students how to do a task  Often improvised 3. Provide reference material 4. Give students a specific goal and have them give it a go 5. Provide impromptu demos if they get stuck 3
Slide 4: Educational Objectives Hands-on experience writing automated test scripts Overcome fear of programming Develop skill rather than just provide knowledge Learn benefits of scripting languages Understand value of different interfaces for testing GUI vs CLI vs API vs Web vs Web Service 4
Slide 5: Browser Automation Web Server Use the COM Automation interface to Internet Explorer Internet Explorer Automation Interface IE Controller & Ruby Tests drive the browser 5
Slide 6: A snippet require 'iec' start_ie("http://localhost:8080") get_forms[0].name = "bret" submit_form(get_forms[0]) 6
Slide 7: Class History STAR East Orlando PNSQC Portland, Oregon STAR West San Jose May 2003 October 2003 October 2003 7
Slide 8: Building the Ad Hoc Lab Students provide Windows laptops Instructors provide:  Wired/Wireless Network  Router, Hubs, Cables   Laptop (Mac) running web server Projector 8
Slide 9: Problems with Student Laptops May: Old Creaky Laptops    No CD drive No Network Card Flaky Behavior Firewalls Proxies Unusual Network Software Configurations Oct: Increased Network Security    Also: Easier to distribute files from Mac than Windows! 9
Slide 10: What’s on the CD Software      Ruby 1.6.8 (Matz, Thomas, Hunt) Timeclock (Marick) Distributed Ruby (Seki) IE Controller (Morris) Tutorial Example Solutions (Pettichord, Marick) Tutorial Handouts   Brief examplebased documentation (“cheat sheets”) Lab exercises Books and Articles    Programming with Ruby (Thomas, Hunt) “Programming in Ruby” (Thomas, Hunt) “Bypassing the GUI” (Marick) We’ve also used a few slides 10
Slide 11: Ruby Cheat Sheet Variables Conditionals Function calls Function definitions Very simply regular expressions Truth and falsehood Objects and methods and messages Arrays Dictionaries Iteration 11
Slide 12: Spring Tutorial Agenda Browser Cocoa GUI Command Line Guts Show Web browser interface and GUI (on Mac) Teach how to test CLI Teach Ruby and IRB Teach xUnit test harness Teach how to test Web service interface Finish with testing Web browser interface 12
Slide 13: Changes from Spring to Fall Start with Web Browser Testing    Students really took to it Felt most like testing Direct feedback using IRB What a class is Difference between a method and a message Students didn’t need it 13 Drop language theory   
Slide 14: Who Benefits? Designed for testers scared of programming Worked better for testers with some programming experience Experienced programmers were able to run ahead and stay engaged Requires two instructors for classes of 30 students 14
Slide 15: Pair Programming We suggested that students pair program They mostly resisted Laptop requirement made students committed to using their laptops Problem with “bad pair” 15
Slide 16: Changes Planned Don’t require connection to network Use USB drives to share code and encourage pairing Teach pair programming as a technique Add names to Timeclock controls Drop web services material Conclude with language comparison and technical overview of IE Controller Organize and improve suggested solutions  Also, put them all in a regression suite Update to Ruby 1.8 and newest WTR Improve installation docs & software  Problems using DOS CLI Resolve interface disputes IE Controller (WTR) improvements  16
Slide 17: New Homebrew Tutorial Survey scripting languages and open source test tools  http://www.io.com/~wazmo/papers/homebrew_test_automation_200311.pdf Use Ruby WTR as basis for exemplar test suite Create demo test suite with examples of different kinds of tests  functional, concurrency, scenario Use STAF for distributed testing Plan to teach through local groups (e.g. SPINs) 17
Slide 18: Scripting Languages Free Free Mature Doc Ruby Python Perl TCL VBScript Line Interp ** *** ? *** OO Func Dyn COM Templ ating      *** ** * ? * * ** *** *** *** *** ** * * *½ *** ** *** **       ** ?  18
Slide 19: Building Your Own Any decent language can call Internet Explorer’s COM Automation interface. Many applications built with Microsoft technology have COM Automation interfaces. There are equivalent interface mechanisms for other technologies. Perl example   Samie (Wasserman) http://samie.sourceforge.net/ 19
Slide 20: IE Controller / WTR Wiki  http://www.clabs.org/wtr/ http://rubyforge.org/projects/wtr/ http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?IeController Mailing List  Overview  20
Slide 21: IE Automation Reference http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/browser/webbrowser/reference/Objects/InternetExplorer.asp 21