From the monthly archives:

April 2012

Rapid Strides at InfoStretch

The much awaited StarEast  2012 conference is here and we are very excited to make a few announcements about our newest products and solutions at this conference. So here goes….first, our website has a new face! Check us out at www.infostretch.com.  We have an all new customers page which talks about years of credibility we have earned with our most trusted customers  in providing enterprise QA,  mobile testing, mobile app development and certification solutions across several major verticals.

Our newest initiatives are focused around providing advanced certification solutions for the health care vertical with our flagship product QMetry ACE. Our premise is this, if you’re introducing multiple applications and if you’re an app store, quality becomes a major differentiating factor, especially because of the test and certification rigor that these applications have to go through. What we  provide is a solid framework based solution to take care of that verification piece, which will enable app stores to deliver a high quality application to end users. And, there is a whole ecosystem of products that work in alignment with the QMetry ACE. Visit our products page to get more information on how we use these for you – http://www.infostretch.com/Products/product-ace-solutions.php.

Have you ever thought about rightsourcing? Well, yes, I know what you’re thinking; I know about crowdsourcing, what are these guys talking about? I’m talking about rightsourcing your application to the right guys. Alright, let me cut the chase here. We’re introducing a new platform and it’s called MobiXperts.  With MobiXperts, all you need to do is submit your app through a portal, select the tests that you want and we’ll take care of the rest.

It’s as easy as that. And of course, it’s a 100% secure and you have access to a team of experts’ real time, who will be performing these tests on your app.  An idea that is much departed from the crowdsourcing model, because we bring in the security component to this mix. And you have the confidence that you’re talking to a team of certified experts, not any run of the mill QA testers. If you want to know more about this, feel free to email us at info@infostretch.com.  Or, if you’re at StarEast then, stop by booth #18 to see a demo.

The enterprise QA side of our service is making rapid strides with the introduction of Managed Testing services for verticals such as healthcare, banking and retail. What is Managed Testing? According to SivaKumar Anna, our Director of Enterprise QA, MTS is an end-to-end fully customized service in which we take responsibility for test activities at either enterprise or program level. A collaborative approach to sourcing, testing and QA services, MTS is the solution for clients who want to transform their testing function and achieve high-quality systems cost-effectively, without the expense of large overheads and day-to-day responsibilities, and without losing overall control. MTS will launch as an official service offering soon. Please stay tuned to see updates on our site. www.infostretch.com

Again, if you’re at StarEast, remember to stop by booth #18 to talk to our mobile testing and QA gurus. And if you’re interested in knowing more about Selenium automation, then Siva will be giving a talk on April 19th at 11:15 am EST. He will tell you how we’ve evolved our best practices framework to maturity and share some complex real-life scenarios where our Selenium implementations have been a huge success. He will also show you a demo of the InfoStretch Selenium Framework in action on the Kindle Fire.

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HTML5, Native or Hybrid…where is the herd heading?

The debate is overblown and the mobile technology landscape is incredibly confusing. There are numerous choices from HTML5 based mobile web application to native application development methods.

 

At Infostretch we have developed numerous mobile solutions including native and  web solutions for mobile. The biggest issue to address is the ongoing battle between HTML5 and Native, most of the debate between the two is focused around various parameters, however the decision should be made based on the requirements such as application performance, platform compatibility, hardware access requirements, offline usage, offline storage, data security, user experience, scalability and of course; return on investment.

Native application is preferred because…

  • HTML5 apps are a ‘browser app’ – several aspects are not as optimized for user interaction as a native app. For example, very long scrolling lists run slower in browsers even with HTML5.
  • Accessing certain hardware like barometers, cameras, near field communication (NFC) chips and so on is not available presently.
  • The security of locally-stored data is still not widely adopted
  • Interpreted (JavaScript) and rendered (HTML and CSS) code delivers a generally slower experience than a compiled native app.

HTML5 based Mobile web is preferred because…

  • Allows excellent UX elements such as 3D animation, canvas drawing capabilities and more…
  • HTML5 promises to be the new standard for mobile web on all smart phones
  • Most Smart phones including Windows Phone 7 with Mango IE9 browser supports HTML5
  • HTML5 apps can access certain native hardware like GPS and local on-device storage
  • Performance can be enhanced by deploying HTML5 with Single Page Architecture
  • An easy way to engage users with your company without requiring them to download an app

 

While everyone is religiously preaching for one approach over the other, we at InfoStretch are opting for a third option! The “HYBRID APP APPROACH”

 

Hybrid app development enhances the native capabilities towards adoption of HTML5!

A hybrid app is a native, downloadable app; that runs all or some of its user interface in an embedded browser component. To the user, a hybrid app is a native app as it’s downloaded from the app store or marketplace, it is stored on the device, and it is launched just like any other app. To developers there is a difference, as they write some of their application code in HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and reuse it across multiple platforms.

While there is a work in progress at W3C to allow web apps to access device capabilities like camera, microphone, address book etc. which is a key requirement for many mobile apps, hybrid frameworks such as Open source PhoneGap, plays an important role to make it possible! To improve hybrid app performance, HTML5 deployment with Single Page Architecture is good combination

 

Conclusion:

There really is no controversy; HTML5 won’t end up killing native apps. Instead, HTML5 is simply another tool that will help build a lightweight UI based mobile web applications and can be swiftly integrated into hybrid application to enhance native accessibility. Native apps will continue to have their place since they will likely always have access to more extensive graphics and hardware capabilities compared to HTML5-driven apps.

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Java – The Most Preferred Language for Web UI Test Automation using Selenium

The quality engineering has gained the popularity as same way as software design and development and sometime more than some of the development technologies; as it is required for most of the application /systems. As being most recognized company in Quality engineering, we observed that most of the companies will have quality engineering department of their own even-though the software development is out sourced to other vendors.

Now a days, software test engineering (QA) is not just limited to test case managements with tools like QMetry etc. and test execution manually. But there are many areas like test automation, performance / load testing, security testing, SOA testing and code review with testing etc. being introduced and widely used by each departments at different level. In all of this, the test automation is very much popular as it reduces the regression test duration plus easily integrated with continuous build systems etc. to result in best ROI over the time.

There are many automation tools available which can be used by any manual test engineer for regression tools like Selenium IDE, Sahi etc.. Still once you start the automation, there will be  some more demand  from your QA Manager / Test Lead / Project manager / CTO about test results, debugging, reusability, continuous integration, maintainability, execution from cloud etc. and that will required you to develop the framework using scripting language / programming language.

Amongst big group of automation tools, selenium is the only tool which supports many programming languages ranging from simple  like HTML to complex like Ruby/Java/C# to automate the test bed of your web application. As selenium supports variety of languages for automation, manier  get confused to select the suitable language for automation. Mainly the selection of laungage depends on many different crieterias as well. Therefore  to overcome from this delta situation, I tried to get input from different big players in automation world about the preferred language and based on which crieteria they select that etc. We had run the poll for same for quite a month long time and able to get good information as descried in following sections of this post.

Overall Result:

Language preferred for Selenium Test Automation Project? Write in comment for other languages.

Language preferred for Selenium Test Automation Project? Write in comment for other languages.

We can see that JAVA got around 77% votes from total 194 votes worldwide.  The HTML, PHP and Javascript etc. was not part of selection but few peoples are using this for their test automation.

We have got some language selection criteria based on the feedback during this poll are:

  1. SUT development environment
  2. Open Source Tool
  3. Material/libraries available for language
  4. Performance and Transaction Time
  5. Easy to code, IDE
  6. Language exposure to automation engineer

Etc.

If we have to rate these criteria’s, then the first point will win the race and most of has voted based on this criteria.

Brainstorming: Based on first preference and poll data, can we think that JAVA is most popular in development as well!!

The consolidated feedback and related information is as below.

1. SUT development environment

Many time, we (auto architects) think to use the language as same as the application under test development platform/language. Because it help us to use the same tests as unit tests and helps us for customization etc.

“I prefere Python because I like this language and I used if for wide range of tasks before I start automation with Selenium. Python has everything what I need for any purposes. But Current project based on PHP, so one of requirement was that automation will also based on PHP” – how can you leave your preference.

Helps in unit testing – “ Being able to write Selenium tests in JUnit allows me to do end-to-end testing of our server-side Java application and browser clients. So I can call into a backend Java application(handy for me when doing test setup and cleanup) and control the browser from the tests. I can also easily take automated screenshots of the browser view.”.

Further from other expert, “It really depends on what your goals are. Personally I prefere using the language the app is written in. Of the benefits its nice to be using the same language and tool chain the developers are using to make collaboration and integration points simpler.”

Manish says, “I’m working in a product that uses Selenium RC with C# and codedUI and I’m enjoying it and the reason of choosing c# is the same app written in .Net”

More specific quote “For your tests to be economically maintainable, they need to be in a Turing-complete language (e.g. not HTML-based). That said, assuming either: 1. There’s no dedicated QA team and testing is an integral function of Development or 2. there’s a dedicated QA team that works closely with development, the only responsible choice for your scripts is in the language of the application under test. Otherwise, cooperation with Development for test case issue resolution will be difficult as not all members may be familiar with the script language.”

2. Open source Tool

We all know that why JAVA won the race, because it is open source.

“Eclipse with JAVA and selenium is free, however .NET IDE is not free. There is an open source .net IDE called mono that could be used with selenium;”

Ratankumar adds “ I’d prefer JAVA, as it is also open source and easily available for download.”

3. Material/Libraries available for language

The availability of the documentation / samples / tutorials can matter the selection of the language for your selenium (others as well) automation projects very well because not all test automation engineers / architectures will have strong programming language experience. So this type of supporting material helps them for quick start. Selenium is the very best automation platform which gives us the wide variety of language selection for automation and which make ease for the new people to quick start with the help of this kind of supporting material.

“I favor Perl because I can use the martial from CPAN.org to build a framework. I have lot of modules that I can interface to the selenium api” – Perl selection for automation based on this criteria.

Kshitij describes in same line “ I prefer java/junit with Eclipse, due to easy available solution on web and most other plugins and technology for automation is available in Java.. So its easy to integrate with selenium.”

C# Documents seems ahead of all, “ C# has a ton of documentation and tools that can complement your script development efforts.”

Do you think same “ There’s much less user support for Perl, but having that extensibility opens up many avenues. I’m looking forward to checking out the Webdriver Perl bindings.”

4. Performance and Transaction times

Sometimes we think on this before starting the automation development.

Selenium can perform well with Java. Do you agree with “Selenium is built on JAVA and runs through a JVM. So I suggest using the language that selenium was created in.”

5. Easy to code, IDE

Definitely this is the easiest criteria as well, but test automation sometimes required customization in results presentation, looping based on data etc. So I am not sure that whatever language we will define as “easy to code” will be good selection for test automaton. Still we can find some other supporting interfacing language etc. like HTML is very easy so try to use Java Script extensions with this will definitely help you to keep it easy to code plus some level of customization. Let me describe same thing in users’ words: “I prefer html tests/cases with selenium server + js extentions + Hudson”.

Also, IDE does matter in the selection as it helps us to make our coding with easy due to context sensitive help, auto complete etc. C# IDE Visual Studio, Java IDE Eclipse etc. are good IDEs and is important point in language selection decision making process.

“If you have access to the VisualStudio IDE you cant go wrong with that”. I like this.

6. Language exposure to automation engineer

Sometimes we do not disclose or mention this criteria, but I think it is always get hidden consideration for language selection.

Are you thinking same? “I personally prefer Java because that’s the language I’m most familiar with. However, if the project and its timeline provided the opportunity for my learning curve, I would love to try out some other languages – it for nothing more than to see what differences there are.”

Anand is asking us with explanation, “Depends on which language you are already comfortable in, isn’t it? If you are comfortable in JAVA you don’t learn PHP to write selenium tests. As far as I know, most of the bindings provides the same features. And thanks to people behind Selenium for making this possible !”

In short, all points has their own pros and cons but this poll has created a platform to help someone to ask related queries to other who using same language.

At last, thanks to all for voting and commenting. We will come up with something similar and useful topic again!! 

courtesy:

  1. Selenium Automation User Group
  2. Infostretch Selenium Test Automation Framework
  3. All the linked in users who voted and commented on poll : “Language preferred for Selenium Test Automation Project? Write in comment for other languages.”

Thanks and Regards,

Akhilkumar Patel

Waiting for your suggestions and queries!!

 

 

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