Key impediments and pitfalls people run into when trying to use AATs, and how to get over them

1. AUTOMATED
ACCEPTANCE TESTING
GOOD PRACTICES AND PITFALLS
Wyn Van Devanter
wyn.vandevanter@excella.com
@wynv

2. Part I
AAT Overview

3. Automated Acceptance Tests (AATs)

4. Given – When – Then
Given I have no food
When I buy 2 pickles on
Amazon
Then I have some food

5. End-to-end UI, Integration tests

6. Acceptance
Component
Unit
Black box
White box
End-to-end
Business facing
Localized
Technology
facing

7. Manual Checking
End-to-end
UI
Component
Unit
SOURCE: http://blogs.agilefaqs.com/2011/02/01/inverting-the-testing-pyramid

8. Manual
Checking
Inverting the Testing Pyramid
UI
Acceptance,
Integration
Unit
-Exploratory testing

9. Acceptance Test Strategy
• Happy paths
• Major unhappy paths
• Legacy
• Regression

10. Minimize # of end-to-end tests
• AATs should be a small portion of your test suite
• Is your new feature entirely new?
• Balance high # of unit tests + selected end-to-end &
acceptance

11. Create them for journeys, not stories
• Too heavy, slow and expensive to create for each story
• Must be tracked outside of stories

12. Who writes acceptance tests?

13. Those closest to the work should
inplement the tests
• More efficient
• Most correct

14. A framework is key
• Code reuse
• Rapid development
• Readable tests
• More maintainable tests

15. Don’t go through the UI
• Controller down, service down
• Use mocks, stubs

16. What can you write them in?
Vim

17. Part II
How they work

18. Start with a story
User story
As an internet user,
I want to search for “ALT.NET”
And get valid results
• Acceptance criteria 1: I get at least 100k results
• Acceptance criteria 2: Results ordered by relevance
…
Scenarios
Feature

19. Tracking AATs

20. Tracking AATs

21. Various Frameworks
Browser driver
Browser automation
Test runner/harness
BDD Framework
.NET
Selenium,
Phantom.js
Selenium,
Waitn
NUnit, xUnit,
MSTest
SpecFlow,
Fitness (.NET
runner),
Cuke4Nuke,
MSpec
JavaScript
Selemium,
Phantom.js
Phantom.js/Casp
er.js
Mocha, Jasmine
Chai, Jasmine
Java/Ruby
Selenium,
Phantom.js
Selenium,
Waitr
JUnit, test-unit
JBehave, Fitness,
Cucumber/RSpec/
Capybara

22. Why Have AATs? (Pros)

23. Communication
• Helps specify behavior of the system in plain text
• Provides a medium for non-tech and devs to agree on
Are we
talking
about
the right
system?

24. Seams, unit test mistakes

25. Automation
“There’s no place for
human beings to be
doing regression testing
manually.”
-Jez Humble

26. Speedier deployments

27. Save resources

28. More testing during development

29. Why NOT Have AATs?

30. Why don’t more people use them?

31. Impediments
• Poor adoption
• Bandwidth/Velocity
• Learning Curve/Experience
• Business users won’t write specifications

32. Why NOT have AATs?
• Maintenance
• Speed
• High false negatives, non-determinism

33. Questions?

34. Part IV
Overcoming the
Impediments

35. Use a headless browser

36. When Acceptances Tests catches a bug
• See why bug got through unit/integration tests
• Add unit, integration tests
• Prune AAT?
Unit

37. Concise Specs
• Declarative
• Reuse steps
• Concise, many methods, fat fixtures
Bad:
• Click on Log In button
• Click username box and type ‘myUsername’ and click ‘password’ box and type
‘myPassword’
• Click on link for Transfer Payment
• Click box for amount and type 400
• Click ‘Transfer’ button
• Assert success message
Good:
• Login as ‘MyAccountName’
• Navigate to Transfer Payment page
• Transfer 400 dollars
• Assert success message

38. Organize your tests…
Use Page Objects
Keeps each page’s tests
• Encapsulated
• Readable
• Reusable

39. public class GoogleHomepage: PageBase, IGoogleHomepage {
// Flow for this page
}
Domain
Service
UI
GoogleHomepage
+search(query)
+clickSearch()
+clickGettingLucky Data Access
GoogleHomepageService
+search(query)
+clickSearch()
+clickGettingLucky
IGoogleHomepage
+search(query)
+clickSearch()
+clickGettingLucky
Page
Objects

40. Page Objects
Faster test creation – like Legos
• Keeps step definitions very readable and thin

41. Hides details
• Abstracts SpecFlow from Selenium
• Keeps infrastructure at a lower level

42. Keeps changes minimal
• Changes in the application should require minimal
changes in the tests, and not in the specs

43. Easier to write new tests
• Constructing page objects
• Can be used to create a DSL

44. One way
[When(@"I log in with the teacher account '(.*)'")]
public void WhenILogInWithTheTeacherAccount(string orgCode)
{
var driver = new FirefixDriver();
driver.Navigate().GoToUrl("http://www.google.com");
var userTb = Driver.FindElement(By.Name("username”));
var passwordTb = Driver.FindElement(By.Id("password"));
userTb.SendKeys(username);
passwordTb.SendKeys(password);
var loggedInLink = Driver.FindElement(By.LinkText("Log Out"));
Assert.That(loggedInLink != null);
}

45. Better way – page objects
public class LogInPage : PageBase
{
public PageBase LogIn(string username, string password)
{
Driver.FindElement(By.Id("UserName")).SendKeys(username);
Driver.FindElement(By.Id("Password")).SendKeys(password);
Driver.FindElement(By.CssSelector("input[type="submit"]")).Click();
return GetInstance<AccountLandingPage>(Driver);
}
public void HasExpectedTab(string tabName)
{
var link = Driver.FindElement(By.LinkText(tabName));
Assert.AreEqual(tabName, link.Text);
}
}

46. Other things
• Managed test data
• Distributed execution

47. Tips

48. Developer tips
• Don't run in same assembly as other tests, so these can
be run separately since they're very slow (i.e. nightly)
• Navigation
• Create different levels of suites depending on depth/level
of feedback desired:
• Smoke, Current iteration/sprint, Regression
• Run AATs as close to the real environment as possible

49. Gherkin
Specs shouldn’t have much setup code
Given I am on the homepage
And I click login
And I enter username of ‘username’ and password of ‘password’
When clicking ‘Log In’
Then take me to my landing page
Given I am on the homepage
When logging in with ‘username’ and ‘password’
Then take me to my landing page

50. UI tests
• Sometimes tests will fail if the page doesn’t have enough
time to load
• Capture screen shots when tests fail
• Run nightly
• Run across multiple machines

51. Anti-patterns
• Developers writing acceptance tests by themselves, for
themselves
• Tying AATs to an implementation - unit tests are
implementation specific, AATs are NOT
• Too much repetition in the gherkin
• Too many UI tests
• UI tests are failing too easily when changing the UI

52. Conclusion

53. Where we can be
• Reliable tests
• Reusable test code (even a DSL)
• Separation of concerns
• Short and clear tests
• Fast test creation
• Quick regression feedback
• Tests that are understood by non-technical people
• Fewer bugs

54. Resources:
Tools used here:
• SpecFlow – specflow.org
• PhantomJS – phantomjs.org
• Selenium WebDriver – seleniumhq.org
Books:
• Specification By Example, Gojko Adzic
• Continuous Delivery, Jez Humble, David Farley
• Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided By Tests, Steve Freeman, Nat Pryce
Articles:
• Automated Acceptance Tests, http://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/articles/automated-acceptance-tests
• BDD with SpecFlow and ASP.NET MVC, http://blog.stevensanderson.com/2010/03/03/behavior-driven-
development-bdd-with-specflow-and-aspnet-mvc/
• Using Gherkin Language in SpecFlow,
https://github.com/techtalk/SpecFlow/wiki/Using-Gherkin-Language-in-SpecFlow
• BDD with SpecFlow, MSDN, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/gg490346.aspx
• Using SpecFlow with the Page Object, http://blogs.lessthandot.com/index.php/EnterpriseDev/application-lifecycle-
management/using-specflow-to
• Problems with Acceptance Tests, http://xprogramming.com/xpmag/problems-with-acceptance-testing
• Top 10 reasons why teams fail with Acceptance Testing, http://gojko.net/2009/09/24/top-10-reasons-why-teams-
fail-with-acceptance-testing/
• Maintaining Automated Acceptance Tests (ThoughtWorks), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uf0EVbH5hdA
• Creating Maintainable Automated Acceptance Test Suites, Jez Humble,
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-L_2y6g5DI

55. Happy Three Amigos
Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/wynvandevanter/automated-acceptance-
tests-in-net
Code:
https://github.com/Wyntuition/AATsInSpecFlowDemos
wyn.vandevanter@excella.com
@wynv