Re: [Wtr-general] Design Problems

Michael Bolton Wed, 11 Jan 2006 09:34:31 -0800

I would like gently to suggest that your inexperience as a developer isn't the problem here. This is a fundamental question about test automation in general. You're not alone; I'm not convinced that very many people have thought particularly hard about it. I think enough time has gone by that people now understand that a debugger will neither find nor fix your bugs. In a similar kind of way, WATIR will not use or test your application; YOU will. WATIR will help you to do that by pressing keys or performing mouse clicks, scanning the screen and reacting to patterns that you've told it about, and doing all that really quickly. So: if Store 2 requires you to answer some questions, what would those questions be? If Store 2 requires you to behave differently, what are the differences? At what point do they diverge from the behaviours for Store 1?

The fundamental problem is: what do you mean by "a generic test"? For me to answer this question in a way that would help you, I would have to know what you would do manually and cognitively if you didn't have WATIR available. Then solving the programming problem is relatively straightforward. Relatively. And I don't think you'll need our help as much as you might think you do.

One way you can do some of the things that you're doing below is to take the "do some assertions" part, and wrap those into a method that /isn't/ a test_something method, and to take the stuff where you enter data and do something similar, such that we might see

def test_store_1

login_to_store_1

order_some_product

fill_in_some_data

click_submit

logout

end

def_test_store_2

login_to_store_2

order_some_product

fill_in_some_data

click_submit

logout

end

def login_to_store_1

enter_user_name_and_password

end

def login_to_store_2

enter_user_name_and_password

enter_credit_card_info

answer_some_questions

end

def fill_in_some_data

    @ie.text_field(:name, "fname").set("Terry")
    @ie.text_field(:name, "lname").set("Peppers")
    @ie.text_field(:name, "address").set("123 Foo")
    @ie.text_field(:name, "zip").set("90210")
    @ie.text_field(:name, "city").set("Foobar")
    @ie.text_field(:name, "state").set("FO")
end

def click_submit

@ie.button(:name, "submit").click

end

On the other hand, if the stores themselves don't behave generically, then the tests will have to incorporate behaviour that's appropriate to the differences:

def_test_store_2

login_to_store_2

jump_through_extra_store_2_hoops

order_some_product

fill_in_some_generic_data

fill_in_other_stuff_specific_to_store_2

click_submit

logout

end

You see?

---Michael B.

From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Terry Peppers
Sent: January 11, 2006 11:32 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [Wtr-general] Design Problems

I'm kind of @ a crossroads right now and I think my inexperience as a developer is beginning to shine pretty hard. Here's my general problem: I'm trying to compose a generic test that I can use to test many different sites - however, each site behaves slightly different then the other sites. So I'm @ a bit of a design quandry.

An example:

class OrderTest < Test::Unit::TestCase
def setup
    @ie = IE.new
    @ie.goto("http://www.store1.com")
    @ie.wait
end

def order_something
    # pick a product
    @ie.link(:name, "some_product).click

    # do some assertions
    # ...

    # click
    @ie.button(:name, "done").click

    # fill in some data
    # do some assertions
    # ...
    @ie.text_field(:name, "fname").set("Terry")
    @ie.text_field(:name, "lname").set("Peppers")
    @ie.text_field(:name, "address").set("123 Foo")
    @ie.text_field(:name, "zip").set("90210")
    @ie.text_field(:name, "city").set("Foobar")
    @ie.text_field(:name, "state").set("FO")

    # click
    @ie.button(:name, "submit").click

    # do some assertions
    # ...
end

def teardown
    @ie.close
end
end

So this example works great for 'store1' but what happens if I want to test 'store2.' 'Store2' requires a credit card and wants to ask you some questions.

Right now I'm cluttering up my test case with a lot of conditionals/case statements so that it can react accordingly, but that doesn't seem really elegant to me. Does anyone know of a better way to do this? I was chewing on possibly creating a 'order_something' object that could insert the proper steps and assertions based on the 'store' that it's testing - but to be honest I'm not even sure how to do that. Also, maybe this is a place where exceptions should be used - I don't think so, but I don't know. Any ideas?

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