DEV Community: Praveen Mishra

10 Biggest Remote Testing Challenges And How To Resolve

Praveen Mishra — Thu, 01 Aug 2024 13:14:31 +0000

After the COVID-19 pandemic hit the world, almost every organization was forced to allow its employees to work from home which made us realize the challenges of working remotely.

Although most industries coped up with the remote working process, it was a bit intimidating for software companies. Software testing teams were impacted the most due to the location and synchrony constraints. The dependence on physical devices, infrastructure, and the internet makes it even more complicated for remote testing teams to execute tasks and overcome the key challenges of software testing.

No doubt, remote testing offers the flexibility and freedom to work from home, but QA teams and the IT companies cannot overlook some key challenges of software testing. This blog will explore all the major challenges associated with remote testing and offer guidance about overcoming the challenges of working remotely. Let’s start!

Key Challenges Of Remote Testing

In the US alone, there was a significant rise of 159% in remote work between 2005 and 2017 (Source: FlexJobs). We can imagine how drastically these numbers have gone up over the last few months. And so have the challenges of working remotely. Software testers particularly bore the brunt of the suddenness in remote work. Remote testing teams have been scrabbling hard to get back on track and we could not help but notice the key challenges of software testing. After interacting with various testers, who are working remotely, we got to know about the biggest remote testing challenges faced by them. Here they are-

1. Lack of Communication

“You can never over-communicate enough as a leader, but at a remote company, nothing could be truer. Since you don’t physically see people in-person, information doesn’t spread in the same way. So leaders need to do the heavy lifting for evangelizing the message.”
— Claire Lew

Lack of communication has turned out to be one of the significant challenges for software teams while working remotely. As per Forbes, it has been observed that working remotely makes it more complicated for employers to communicate, especially when it comes to having discussions that involve critical interpretations. Although individuals use effective communication tools like Slack, Teams, or Google Meetup, sometimes it becomes awkward to clarify the tone and urgency of some messages.

For instance, if your colleagues are working from a different country and they use phrases to describe a problem, chances are you might not get it. That’s why it is crucial to have an effective communication environment, where employees feel comfortable and communicate concisely.

In our opinion, it is recommended to use video calls while communicating with co-workers to understand things like testing requirements, test scenarios, or tools more precisely.

2. Teaming Up

While working in the office, there are superiors or team leaders to see what their employees are working on. But, in a distributed testing team, there is no one to look after, and that’s where QAs find it challenging to make changes in application code. Also, your team members cannot see all the changes that you make in a test script, which makes it difficult to understand whether you’re succeeding at your job or not.

This is one of the key challenges of software testing and that’s where it becomes critical to be in sync with your colleagues. You’ll have to provide continuous updates to your teammates, inform them about the issues that you’re facing, and much more.

Moreover, you can also inform your team members about the features you have tested, how you have tested them, and what changes you noticed after testing a feature. It will make it easier for your co-workers to understand what you’re working on and what you have achieved so far.

3. Technical Failures

Remote testing teams use a lot of technological components, such as a system with multiple applications running on it, third-party screen sharing tools, recording tools, and IM clients. But, no matter how reliable configurations your system has, things can always go wrong. For example, you never know when you run into problems with the internet connection, muddy international phone calls, software not running properly on your computer, etc.

Any of these can delay your work by a considerable time, and you might not be able to get excuses to get over these issues. Thus, it is recommended to test everything a day before you start the testing process. A few things that you could check instantly involve:

*Screen sharing *— Make sure it is not interrupted throughout the testing process due to internet connection.
*Recordings not working *— The last thing you would want after recording a testing scenario is that there is no sound in it, so make sure the recordings are working fine.
*Video recording *— Test the configuration of the recording tool and make sure it doesn’t stop or fluctuate while running multiple applications in the background.
*Internet connection *— Most of the testing scenarios would be executed over the browser, so check the internet connectivity.

Sometimes, a normal technical problem can abruptly end everything in the process, even if you have tested it over a thousand times. Well, we cannot stop technical issues from occurring, but we can prepare ourselves by planning and setting everyone’s expectations ahead of time. The only trick is to stay prepared for all the challenges of working remotely.

4. Cross-cultural Differences

In most companies, remote testing teams work from different areas and countries. For instance, in my company, two testing members work from the USA, while others work from India. Now, the working culture might be similar here and there, but from where we belong does affect our behavior and understanding.

Also, it’s not necessary that all your remote testing team members work in the same way as you do. There can be variations in the ways they execute a task or communicate with others. Thus, before moving on to working with a remote testing team, it is crucial to understand their working behavior and nuances.

Understanding these distinctions is one of the key challenges of software testing. It will help you know the people in a better way, and your remote testing team will be able to function more efficiently.

5. Productive Collaboration

When you work with a team that is distributed geographically, it becomes hard to collaborate with them continuously. Most testers need to stay in front of their laptop at varied time zones to catch up with their team members, and they end up losing a lot of time.

One thing is for sure that you cannot have last-minute meetings while working remotely, especially in varied time zones. Thus, it is better to plan ahead by keeping all the time zones in mind so that every team member can join the meeting as per their convenience.

Besides, you can also opt for a collaboration tool that makes it easier for team members to collaborate closely. For instance, the Screenhero feature of Slack allows two users to see the same screen at the same time. Using such tools is one of the easiest ways to overcome the key challenges of software testing.

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6. Synchronizing Releases

Software testers are responsible for the final release of an application, as they ensure that the application is ready to launch after testing all the components. Also, they need to give continuous updates about the release to the stakeholders as well as other team members involved in the project. But, with remote testing, it becomes a little complicated to give continuous updates about the product release.

Thus, to avoid any bottlenecks in the release cycle, testers should test early, test often, and share the status with others as soon as possible. This way, you can prepare yourself for future releases in advance. Moreover, you can go with the QAOps principle of integrating and testing in parallel for the continuous delivery of products.

Using agile methodologies, you will be able to execute tests early by setting smaller targets. It will also help you analyze the ability and speed of testers at which they accomplish their tasks.

7. Improper Documentation

Even after working remotely for a while, many remote testing teams still believe in communicating verbally rather than keeping documentation about how the product was developed. This, in turn, can delay the release of the product.

In order to release your product at the given timeline, it is recommended to use a checklist and follow along. You can create a checklist of all the tasks that need to be carried out by each member while keeping every team member in the loop with full visibility and transparency. So, when there is an issue with any task, you can update the checklist and inform everyone about it.

Also, if you’re reporting a bug or issue, then specify it clearly, like where it happened and how it happened, to your team. You can also take screenshots to explain the problem in detail. You can use cloud-based platfrom like LambdaTest.

LambdaTest is an AI-powered test orchestration and execution platform that lets you run manual and automated tests at scale with over 3000+ real devices, browsers and OS combinations.T his platform allow you to take screenshots while you test web pages and applications. A special feature called Automated screenshot testing lets you do that for over 3000+ browsers and operating systems combination.

To learn more about LambdaTest and its various functionalities, you can follow this video tutorial to get a complete insight into how to get started with LambdaTest.

This platform also provides learning resources on various automation testing techniques you can Subscribe to the LambdaTest YouTube channel and get tutorials on Selenium testing, Cypress testing, Playwright testing, and more.

8. Multitasking

While moderating a remote testing session, testers have to keep their eyes on multiple things like communicating with the user, onscreen behavior, observing questions and queries via IM, total time remaining in the session, the status of executing the task, and much more. Keeping up with all these activities at a single time can be very confusing for any individual.

Therefore, it is good to have a task management tool in hand that allows you to schedule your tasks and execute them accordingly. By doing so, you will be not only able to moderate remote sessions, but also perform other functions that are crucial for the testing. We further recommend focusing on one task at a time to overcome the most common challenges of working remotely.

9. Lack Of Positive Feedback

Let us consider a scenario- When you spend a lot of time performing a test and later found out that it wasn’t supposed to happen this way. Or you’re working from a remote location with a distributed team, and there is no one to give suggestions on your ideas. Has it ever happened to you?

If yes, then you might understand the importance of feedback. However, not every feedback is provided positively. Let’s say you have developed documentation for testing a specific feature, and your team leader says it looks good.
Later, you realize that the documentation was never published and neither put to any use, which makes you wonder what went wrong. So, you can see that the ‘good’ feedback was actually a no-feedback.

To get positive feedback on your ideas, you can create a community where everyone can speak of what’s in their mind and how they can implement it effectively. If you think this is not one of the key challenges of software testing, remember what Zig Ziglar said- “People often say motivation doesn’t last. Neither does bathing — that’s why we recommend it daily.”

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10. Security & Privacy

Security and privacy are two major concerns of every remote testing team, as the product is in the testing stage and yet to be released to the market. While working remotely, testers need to communicate with their colleagues and stakeholders on a daily basis to give status updates. Also, it is crucial to keep everything confidential before the product release. But, there are always risks involved in losing the internal information to outsiders.

To avoid loopholes while sharing information with team members, it is recommended to use a cloud-based platform that offers password-protected sharing so that no outside user can access the information that you share with your co-workers.

Remote working has become a daily activity for most businesses, especially after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. This has made it hard for remote testers to execute testing tasks, as they face many challenges of working remotely. However, most of these challenges can be resolved by using LambdaTest.

Tips To Overcome Remote Testing Challenges

In the above section, we saw how tough it can be to manage remote testing while overcoming the key challenges of software testing. Depending on your team, product, and project requirements, the challenges of working remotely can vary greatly. The best way to ease your remote testing processes is to use automation. It allows you to ease up the pressure on the testing team while making it easier for them to find bugs. Automation can be used in multiple ways including Selenium test automation and much more-

Regression Testing

If you choose the manual approaches, then you already know how much time it would take to execute regression testing. However, if you use automation, it can be done in the minimum time possible while improving the testing team’s productivity and providing quick feedback on the changes.

Another advantage of using automation for regression testing is that the QA team can continue working on other tasks while keeping the test automation running in the background. With an automated regression testing strategy, the QA team doesn’t need to be available at ad-hoc times for testing the changes made by developers.

Upgrade to Agile Methodologies

Using Agile methodologies is one of the best ways to test remotely; it enables you to test your website at every stage of development with minimum human intervention. Also, having a CI/CD pipeline in the process ensures that the code changes are tested immediately whenever they are integrated into the application interface.

Continuous testing/integration can be executed at different stages of environments like Development, QA, Staging, and Production.

Use Test-Driven Development Approach

The test-driven development approach involves creating test scripts even before developing the feature, which means testers automate the test scripts for components that need to be developed and then integrate it into the system.

However, in test-driven development, the test might fail again and again if it doesn’t meet the expected behavior of the feature. It will only pass if it starts meeting the predicted behavior of the feature. Also, with test-driven development in place, testers and developers need to work hand-in-hand for better flexibility and productivity.

Implement In-Sprint Test Automation

Companies that are using Scrum in their software testing processes need to implement in-sprint test automation for quick results. In-sprint automation not only helps in keeping up with the regression testing, but it also enables testers and developers to focus on other essential tasks. With in-sprint automation, you can also get better results from continuous testing and integration.

Use An Automated Testing Tool

If you haven’t started using automation for remote testing yet, then this is the best time to look for an automation testing tools. For starters, you can begin with the open-source Selenium suite, which gives you access to four different tools for automation testing, including Selenium Grid, WebDriver, IDE, and RC.

However, Selenium is a tricky tool to be used by beginners; only experts having experience in automation testing can use Selenium to its maximum potential. Also, if you’re looking for a tool that is ideal for an entire testing team, then LambdaTest is your best bet.

LambdaTest enables you to test your web app for multiple scenarios like responsive testing, regression testing, cross browser compatibility testing, and more. Moreover, it allows you to share testing sessions with your team members via screenshots or video recording.

Learn to download and setup Selenium ChromeDriver to effortlessly run Selenium tests on Chrome browser.

Wrapping Up

Working remotely is not a new trend; many companies have been following it already for a long time. But, it was never implemented to an entire workforce. Before the pandemic, development and testing teams were always working from offices even if other team members were working remotely. However, the pandemic has changed the whole situation; companies are now forced to give all their employees work from home. This has become a little challenging for remote testing teams and that is what we have tried to highlight in this blog. In case we have missed out on the challenges of working remotely, let us know what the key challenges of software testing are and how you overcome them.

Happy testing!

Codeless Automation Testing: What, Why & How?

Praveen Mishra — Fri, 04 Feb 2022 12:51:09 +0000

We are witnessing an agile transition through small and big enterprises alike. Without a doubt, Automation testing has become a need of the hour. Selenium automation testing empowered automation tester to expand its test coverage. However, the skillset required to leverage Selenium is also escalated, if compared to manual testing. You would have to learn a programming language in order to work with Selenium WebDriver or Selenium Grid. Selenium IDE though has been a different story.

Note- HTML escape is used to represent special characters in HTML code. For example, < less than symbol > has a special meaning in HTML markup language. This tool will convert a string to HTML entities or convert HTML entities to plain text.

Launched in 2006, Selenium IDE has been a revolutionary tool that allowed manual web testers to perform codeless automation testing. With Selenium IDE, web testers were able to record their web interactions with the web browser and playback those interactions. For those who weren’t well versed with the programming languages were rejoiced with the arrival of Selenium IDE. As now, they could automate their daily or repetitive rounds of cross browser testing by leveraging codeless automation testing!

But what is codeless automation testing? Why is it important for teams? How is codeless automation testing performed? Well, to answer it in simple words, I thought of coming up with an infographic. Here it is!

If you’re new to Selenium and wondering what it is then we recommend checking out our guide – What is Selenium?

Note- The HTML Unescape {html.unescape()} method helps us to convert the ascii string into html script by replacing ascii characters with special HTML characters. This tool will convert HTML entities to a string or convert plain text to HTML entities.

To know more, refer to our blog on What Is Codeless Automation Testing And Why It Is The Future?

Note- The MD4 Hash Calculator produces a 32-digit hexadecimal number that is highly unlikely to match the value produced for a different input.

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What Is QAOps? And Why It Matters For Your Web Application?

Praveen Mishra — Tue, 01 Feb 2022 13:13:25 +0000

QAOps refers to maintaining software quality by approaching it with a DevOps mindset. You must have come across the term “DevOps”. DevOps refers to Software Development (Dev) and IT Operations (Ops) and establishes a relationship between development and IT Operations. The purpose of introducing DevOps as a business practice is to improve the collaboration between the two business units.

Quality Assurance (QA) plays a major role in the delivery of a quality software product. If it is possible to bring software development and software operations together, wouldn’t it be possible for organizations to bring software QA and software operations together as a business practice? This brings a new flavor to DevOps known as QAOps framework.

Introduction to QAOps Framework

In simple terms, QAOps aims at improving the software delivery process, making it faster and stable without compromising on the quality of your website or web application. Technically speaking, a QAOps framework integrates the QA processes into the software operation to make a more seamless and integrated software operational model. QAOps framework integrates the QA processes, automation and QA Reporting dashboard with the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) process. In a nutshell, QAOps takes the core ideas from continuous testing in DevOps, such as CI/CD and bringing together the siloed teams together to work on the pipeline and applies the same to QA process.

Definition of QAOps

While there is no official definition for QAOps, we can define the technique based on these two principles.

The main idea of introducing the QAOps framework is to integrate the continuous testing in DevOps with the Continuous Integration (CI)/Continuous Deployment(CD) pipeline rather than performing software testing at indefinite intervals.
QAOps framework increases the collaboration between the QA engineers and developers. Therefore, QA engineers must work closely with software developers, operations personnel and everyone involved in the CI/CD pipeline.

Basic Practices For QAOps Frameworks

QAOps solves the most common disputes that persist between the testing team and Quality Assurance teams. Problems where testers “expect” the issue to have been solved by the QA team and vice versa are completely eliminated through the QAOps practice. QAOps brings in cooperation among the different departments of the organization. QAOps makes use of the following high-level testing practices to put the concept of QAOps into action –

1. Automated Testing

This is one of the main pillars of the QAOps framework. Automation testing means performing tests with the help of technology and tools, and very minimal human effort. QA engineers must study the product in detail and understand the specifications before building the automation framework. Depending on the product and the actual stage of development, QA engineers can decide which tests can be automated successfully to help save time and test the functionalities in a more effective way.

The most obvious types of testing to automate are going to be your regression test cases. They consume the quality time of the testers which can be effectively used to build automation test cases. Similarly, frequently used functionality in the product should also be automated. Why? As your product grows in functionality and features, you don’t want your most-used functions to fail and create a bad experience for the users!

Let us consider a user story to understand this better. Andrew, a web tester who is primarily tasked to ensure browser compatibility of the web-application. Andrew being in the testing domain realizes how time-consuming manual cross browser testing can turn out to be. Testing a web-application or a webpage over hundreds of browsers + OS combinations one by one can consume a significant amount of his time and his bandwidth in a release window.

Not to mention, testing the same dozens or hundreds of browsers + OS combinations is bound to get monotonous and dull for Andrew after a while. Andrew also realizes that if he devotes all of his time in performing manual browser compatibility testing over the same test script and combinations, every week, then finding unique test cases would be a little too much to expect. So what can Andrew do?

This is exactly where automated cross browser testing can come to his aid. With open-source frameworks like Selenium, automation testing can become a lifeline for Andrew to complete his test cycles on-schedule. However, Andrew would still need to figure out which test cases to automate as he cannot automate everything.

Automation testing from scratch will require a thorough phase of planning and documentation. However, once that phase gets over and Andrew has got the right test suites at his disposal, along with the right automated cross browser testing tool then the road ahead is going to be very pleasant.

2. Parallel Testing

As part of the QAOps framework, testing should run quickly (in parallel with the delivery pipeline). Slowing down the testing efforts will directly affect the delivery process. Running automated tests will definitely speed up the testing process, but not when they are being executed run in a serial manner. To overcome this issue, it’s important for testing engineers to run multiple tests at once (together) rather than running them one after the other.

Let’s continue with the story of Andrew that we considered in the example of automated cross browser testing.

Realizing the perks of automation testing over manual cross browser testing, Andrew came up with multiple automation test scripts to cover different modules of his web application. However, there came another issue that he wasn’t ready for! Andrew used Selenium WebDriver to automate his test scenarios for browser compatibility. Selenium WebDriver would only execute one test at a time and will queue the others. As a consequence, Andrew noticed that the test cycles are still going to get delayed due to serial execution of test scripts.

Now, he implemented his test suite over a Selenium Grid to leverage parallel testing with Selenium. Using Selenium Grid capabilities Andrew was able to run multiple test cases, simultaneously. This reduced his overall test execution by multiple folds allowing him to complete his test requirements on time.

Parallel testing requires larger hardware and infrastructure with more CPUs to run the tests simultaneously. But, the benefits of getting results quickly without disturbing the delivery pipeline is definitely worth the investment in a few CPUs when compared to revenue losses due to delayed product delivery. In modern-day technology, businesses can take advantage of cloud-based cross browser testing tools such as LambdaTest which provides a scalable infrastructure to perform parallel testing.

Note- A Promises represents the eventual result of an asynchronous operation, providing methods to check if it is fulfilled or is rejected and to extract the resulting values.

3. Test Scalability

Once you go-live with your web-application, you collect feedback from your customers, work on suggestions, consider incorporating new features in your upcoming sprints. After every release cycle, your web-application continues to scale, and with it scales the testing requirements! As for every new migration that is committed from CI/CD pipeline, the ripple effect of new code changes over an already running code has to be calculated and validated. So when it comes to infrastructure investment, you need to keep the Scalability testing in your checklist.

That is not all that Scalability is about! Scalability testing also helps to determine the application performance at various conditions by modifying the testing loads. The results of the test show the application’s response to differential loads. The testing routine should be scalable with the CI/CD pipeline. At times, the CI/CD pipeline scales up and down depending on the project requirements. During these times, the testing should also be in sync with the CI/CD pipeline. Scalability testing helps QA engineers to reveal the performance-related challenges of web applications.

As a standard QAOps practice, QA teams must have the scalable infrastructure to perform testing and increase the speed of tests when needed.

Let us wander upon what Andrew did to overcome the issues around scalability?

As Andrew’s web application added more and more features to itself. The cross browser testing checklist also expanded for him as there were now few features which were configured using CSS Subgrid or other newly introduced CSS properties which were not widely accepted by the majority of browsers.

As a workaround, developers had set fallbacks for these problems and Andrew’s responsibility was to make sure that these new applied workarounds are working well with the existing application.

He had to consider scaling up his Selenium Grid to test on more legacy and latest browsers, browser versions, operating systems for both Windows and macOS, also for Android and iOS. Turns out if he keeps on adding these devices to his in-house Selenium Grid infrastructure, he may end up having a huge bill on his manager’s desk. Working in a small scale enterprise he cannot go for cloud-based device labs or infrastructure providers such as RackSpace, or AWS device farm. So what can he do?

He looked out for more options and landed on LambdaTest, which offered him an online Selenium Grid that can scale as per his requirements. He was able to eliminate the hassle of maintaining his in-house infrastructure now, as LambdaTest provided him with machines hosted on-cloud, ready to fire up with a click of his mouse. The best part about LambdaTest Selenium Grid was that not only was it offering the legacy browser versions, it was also updated with the latest browser versions. This saved him time, effort, and the headache that comes with maintaining a Selenium Grid of his own.

Integrating Dev & Ops with QA

The final practice to achieve a QAOps framework is to make the QA activities a part of the CI/CD pipeline. One of the easiest ways to integrate Development and IT operations with QA is to make developers write test cases and IT operations engineers to identify potential UI/UX problems with the web application through QA team assistance. This gives the perfect opportunity for developers and QA engineers to collaborate and get a clear picture of the complete QA process. It also does not mean that QA engineers can take their hands off these processes and stay idle. This collaboration between the different stakeholders only makes the whole process of development and testing more efficient.

Back to Andrew, our test automation specialist, who decided to give QAOps ago and shared his perspective with his manager and stakeholders. He realized that the sooner test cases are written, the faster is the go-to-market launch. He suggested implementing shift-left testing to incorporate the QAOps framework in his enterprise. Ever since the number of anomalies caught after CI/CD pipeline migration was notably reduced.

Life Cycle Of QAOps Framework

QAOps is about setting the right platform with the tools on the CI/CD pipeline to make sure the newly built code is tested and validated. The process of setting up the testing platform involves three major steps (as shown in the above diagram). The processes under QA are familiar to us all as they are similar to the major steps involved in an automation testing life cycle to ensure a stable release of the application.

The QAOps process contains three unique steps – Trigger, Execute, and Report.

Note- Use Rest parameters function to represent an indefinite number of arguments as an array.

1. Trigger

One of the important aspects of QA testing is to trigger the right tests whenever an application functionality change is made in the CI/CD pipeline. The tests should be triggered only based on the changes that are made on the functionality. Otherwise, precious time will be lost in testing the unwanted areas of the application (where there are no changes) or critical areas might be missed out. In short, the more the number of tests, the greater the time to run the tests and share the results. To balance this situation, it’s important for the business to map the tests to the features that are getting built.

Therefore, the triggering step should be well planned and mapped with the automation testing life cycle. This is the first step in the QAOps process and if all goes well, the whole team can be confident of the product release.

2. Execute

The next step in the QAOps process is Execution. After the triggering step, different tests will execute on the functionality. As explained previously, it’s important to make sure the tests run in parallel to save time and generate faster results. To achieve parallel testing, make sure you have the infrastructure that can scale and distribute the loads according to the need. Also, make sure the continuous testing in DevOps environment is highly available to avoid any testing hiccups during the QAOps life cycle.

3. Reporting

Once the tests are triggered and executed, the reporting process kicks in. The reporting module showcases the results of the tests. It’s important to design the reporting module correctly to make the QAOps process an efficient one. A perfect reporting module design should provide quick summary information (in a snapshot) as well as provide detailed information. This will be helpful for anyone taking a look at the reports. Additionally, the reporting module should also be able to store the history of previously run tests so that individual stakeholders can compare the results. Reports should be made easily available and on-demand, when in need.

It’s important that you have the QAOps process implemented properly within your business to make sure you get benefited not just for the project that you are working on, but also on other projects within the organization.

Where can QAOps be used?

As pointed out earlier, though the QAOps framework is more powerful with the help of automated browser testing, it does not rule out the possibility of performing manual testing on the application. Manual cross browser testing can be extremely useful to provide detailed information about the web-application, not to forget, you need unique test cases that can come only by manual testing.

With that said, let us look into particular types of testing, apart from cross browser testing, where the QAOps framework can be a handful.

Functional Exploratory Testing

This testing makes sure if the application is running as expected when met with unexpected scenarios on the fly. No test cases are created in advance, as this type of testing is mostly based on the “thinking” of the testing personnel. Experienced test engineers reproduce the potential application crash scenarios and uncover the bugs using this technique.

Here are a few advantages of functional exploratory testing.

It is more an ad-hoc kind of testing approach with the intention of finding bugs in the web application.
Cognitive thinking from the tester when compared to scripted code.
The next steps of action are decided based on what is currently performed by the user.
Helps the tester to drill down to the smallest areas of the application and cover different edge cases.

Functional Exploratory testing can be used in organizations when a critical application has to be tested and there are experienced testers in the team. It can also be a great learning curve for new testers as they can look at the application from a completely different perspective.

Using QAOps, the collaboration between the QA & Operations team can be well established. With a better understanding of the operation, a QA can deep dive further for exploratory testing in the wild.

Regression Testing

Regression testing plays an important role when you have already developed the software and you want to release an update with a new feature or an enhancement to the existing feature(s). At this time, QAOps will be helpful for test engineers to see if the newly added information has introduced any faults to the existing product.

In an agile software development model, regression testing is often viewed as a process that adds additional overhead to the existing process. QAOps can solve this problem as the process is very easy and affordable by the business.

Geolocation Testing

Every product development company or even for the simple fact, if you are developing a web application, you must know whether it will fit into a particular location. For example, you are developing a B2C web-application for Spain then you have to test over different browsers from various GeoIPs belonging to Spain. Why? It may sound a little shocking to you, but your web application may render differently on different GeoIPs due to internet standards and policies of a country.

With the help of QAOps, your QA team can collaborate with the Operations team to be more familiar with these internet standards. That way they will be able to get the test cycle driven in the right direction from the very start, rather than wandering in the dark and figuring it out by themselves later on.

Note- You can use multi-line strings and string interpolation features with ES6 Template Literals (Template Strings).

How QAOps can be used within an organization?

QAOps might seem a similar term like DevOps, but it does not require a complete cultural change in the workplace. This framework aids developers and testers to mutually collaborate and work in getting faster results and/or testing new pieces of the application thoroughly before release.

However, to make this happen, it’s very important to communicate the value of QAOps to key decision-makers and stakeholders (especially the technical team). They must understand the value behind implementing a QAOps framework. By doing this, it helps the rest of the organization (developers, testing engineers, IT operations managers, etc.,) to understand the requirements and work accordingly. It will take time to convince the stakeholders about this new framework; however, once in place, the company will start realizing the importance of having the QAOps framework in practice.

QAOps Framework – Different School of Thoughts??

There are different school of thoughts that revolve around the concept of QAOps. While it is relatively a new term, some people even question if the term is a valid one or not. A thread on Reddit says that “QAOps ain’t a thing, and it can never be a thing”. QA is a part of the DevOps process and there is no point simply adding an “Ops” term after the word QA. DevOps includes every aspect of development as well as operations and if QA is a part of the development pipeline, it will be included as part of the development cycle. On the other hand, there are social media tags being used for QAOps by various software testing communities.

QAOps was also a proposal raised in the Selenium conference 2018.

Even though the debate exists whether the term QAOps should exist or not, from a business perspective, it’s important for the company to understand the importance of QA Testing. In this modern age of DevOps, QAOps helps to highlight the challenges faced by the QA engineers and showcase the importance of keeping QA testing in line with the DevOps process. QAOps has immensely helped the testing engineers to be on a par with the development (CI/CD) pipeline.

As discussed earlier, QAOps will take its time to get into organizations and become a part of the DevOps process. The stakeholders must explain the benefits and the value of the framework to the key decision-makers and make them understand the importance of it for the organization. Once the framework is introduced, the framework will emphasize the importance of automated software testing and QA to deliver quality applications.

Can QAOps Be Referred As Continuous Testing in DevOps?

In a common DevOps approach, both developers and testers play a vital role. It’s the role of the QA that brings together both the development team and the IT operations together. When we say QA, it’s not just plain testing but continuous testing in DevOps! An organization with a strong strategy for continuous testing in DevOps makes them collaborate to deliver the best web application in the quickest of time. As a result, it’s fair enough to refer to QAOps as Continuous Testing in the DevOps approach.

Let’s see how organizations can embrace continuous testing in DevOps across their different business functions.

A Continuous Integration environment (with both CI/CD) should be configured in order for the developers and testers to perform the tests on the code.
Dev teams MUST perform continuous testing by testing every new functionality that is built in the application. They must test the application for its functionality, performance, ease of use of the interface. One of the best tools for this purpose is Selenium. They must build aggressive test cases to ensure every edge case scenario for the functionality that is built. It is the developer who is the best person to know the entire functionality in detail since he built it.
In parallel, QA teams must also start testing the new functionality to stay on course with the development pipeline.
After the testing is completed by the QA team and sign off is given, the IT Operations team must perform a deployment of the web application and provide sign off. Only after the signoff, the release process should begin.
Similarly, post the release activities, the IT Operations team should keep an eye on the web application to make sure everything is working as expected. They must monitor every aspect of the application to ensure efficiency.

By integrating the Continuous testing process into the SDLC process, businesses can achieve a successful product delivery cycle.

Best Practices

Based on previous experiences and hearing from a lot of people about the DevOps practices across different organizations, here is a set of best practices to embrace Continuous Testing as a part of the DevOps process.

The Continuous Testing process should be integrated into the software development lifecycle. This helps businesses to reduce the risks and ensure faster product release and time to market.
All the teams in the organization (dev, IT operations, QA) should be part of the entire release cycle. They must ensure to collaborate and communicate effectively during the entire course of the release.
CI/CD should be done on a regular basis, preferably daily basis. Everyone’s work must be merged into the release pipeline. This helps in identifying the defects at the early stages and rectifying them before it’s too late.
Quality teams should be a part of the release planning, requirements gathering process. It will be more effective if the quality teams work alongside the development teams to provide vital inputs during development.
Every team’s metrics should be defined and measured at defined intervals during the release process.
QA test engineers should make use of automation tools and scripts to automate as much of the testing possible. Deep regression testing should be performed on the existing features when new functionality is developed to make sure existing features are not broken.
Developers must start thinking as testers, and testers must do the vice versa, (i.e.) fix the code. This makes everyone in the organization takes responsibility for the overall quality of the product.

Wrapping Up

QAOps, Continuous Testing in DevOps as we can also call it, when correctly designed and implemented, definitely paves the road to faster software delivery. This gives the development teams the confidence for a faster time to market without any quality compromises. Reiterating the same point from above, putting QAOps into operation requires a lot of convincing to the stakeholders of the business. Once you are past this stage, it should pretty much be a smooth sail forward.

What Are The Benefits Of Website Testing On The Cloud?

Praveen Mishra — Mon, 31 Jan 2022 12:25:05 +0000

The development of web applications is becoming more and more dynamic. Big and small enterprises are rolling out web applications and upgraded versions in very short intervals. The faster your release cycles are, the more important it becomes to thoroughly your web applications. To support agile methodology, professionals are constantly striving to discover assets beneficial to the QA teams. One such asset is cloud testing where you perform web application or website testing over the cloud.

Cloud-based testing has enabled teams to collaborate better for faster release cycles, allowing us to build web applications at a faster pace by eliminating the restrictions of on-site development. However, I have seen that the adoption for cloud-based testing is a matter of argument in numerous startups, with an employee count in dozens, you feel that there really isn’t much of a need to opt for cloud. But trust me when I say this, cloud-based testing is not a choice anymore, it has become a necessity. And I say this after having to bear the consequences of not opting for website testing on a cloud.

Which is why I thought of noting down the top 11 benefits of website testing on the cloud. On that note, let us take a look at some striking benefits of website testing on the cloud.

1. Better Team Collaboration For Agile Workflows

Agile thrives on collaboration between teams and members of the same team. Website testing on the cloud provides a collaborative platform. Thus, it boosts agile ideas and supports the new approach to testing. Different cloud assets undergo regular updates. So, if the team needs any important information, it is available immediately.

If different teams are working on the same app, it becomes easier to monitor different activities. This approach reduces errors and redundancies. Cloud-based website testing also facilitates continuous integration. This means that the teams can carry out the deployment of new pieces of code faster. It helps teams in maintaining a schedule and deliver important functionalities and features on time.

2. Cost-Effective Infrastructure

Website testing tools on-cloud are more cost-effective when it comes to your own testing infrastructure. The reason being the resources on the cloud is being shared by a pool of users. So say you are cross browser testing on the cloud, then you are leveraging a machine hosted on cloud-based servers. Also the performance of a mac will be the same as a virtual mac os-online Now, after you terminate the session, the cache of the particular machine will get will be cleared and then provided to some other user, as per their demands.

Upgrading the infrastructure or hardware doesn’t cost as much as one would normally expect. Moreover, the total ownership cost of cloud-based website testing tools is also less than the traditional ones. They have limited hardware needs. As a result, the depreciation costs are not high and capital expenditure is minimal.

Website testing in the cloud also allows you to ‘pay as you go’ model. It lets the team use tools only when necessary. This feature implies that you can save costs when the tool is not in use. If you are a startup looking forward to cutting down expenses, this feature can come in handy. And of course, even if you have a pretty decent flow of finances, you can divert the excess funds saved to the further development of the firm. Looks like an opportunity to crank things up a notch, doesn’t it?

3. 24/7 Access to Shared Resources

Users can access resources any time they want irrespective of the device in use. Of course, a steady internet connection is a must. The 24-hour access to resources helps teams to match the customer environment. This helps a company keep up with rapid changes in requirements.

Cloud-based website testing enables users to replicate the customer environment. As a result, testers can detect the defects at an early stage in the SDLC. Moreover, the QA teams residing in different time zones can use the resources anytime they want. This allows for better test coverage in a single day. Ensuring quality and quantity in software testing.

Note- Object.values method returns an array representing property values of a given object. It does not include the prototype properties and it does not enumerate prototype properties.

4. Enhanced Speed

When you are onto website testing using a local infrastructure then the speed at which you can execute your test case will be proportional to the device being used by you and your team. For instance, if we talk about automated browser compatibility testing then Selenium Grid is considered as the most viable option to go with because it offers the ability to run parallel testing with Selenium.
However, the time consumption for test execution and the number of test sessions that you can run in parallel will depend on the hardware capabilities of your machine.

The software run on local hardware doesn’t provide as much speed and efficiency as those hosted on the cloud. Initially, you may even have to perform a hit and trial to find the right infrastructure set up for your website testing requirements. The cloud-based test grid helps you carry out parallel testing without many constraints. This way, the testers don’t have to wait around for a single test to come to a halt before moving on to the next one.

The unlimited test infrastructure capacity also contributes to increased testing speed while using the cloud. Sometimes, tests can require a lot of resources for successful running. When you are testing on the cloud, you don’t have to fret over any compromise in speed. However, you would have to consider latency based upon the network.

5. Automatic Updates For New Devices And Browsers Over The Cloud-Based Website Testing Grid

When a testing framework lets out an upgraded framework, testers ought to add tests for different devices and OS. It’s a significant change and the team needs to carry out the configuration of a local test grid. Of course, this requires time and you might also need to get some new hardware. But when you are testing on the cloud, the updates occur automatically.

As new devices keep coming to the market, they are automatically added to the cloud. In fact, cloud test vendors free you of the responsibility to carry out updates. This way, you can focus on other aspects of your web application without worrying about keeping your Selenium Grid updated.

6. Cloud-Based Simulators Can Save You Money & Time

On a local grid, testing on real devices comes with its own limits. Not every firm has the funds to purchase new devices and test on them. Moreover, managing and hosting tests requires a significant portion of the budget. Using simulators can help you combat the limitations and cut costs at the same time. Cloud-based website testing tools such as LambdaTest can help you perform testing on real desktop devices and simulators for mobile testing, allowing you to perform cross browser testing over a wide range of browsers and operating systems.

Note- Promise.prototype.finally - Whether a promise is fulfilled or rejected, in either case a specified callback function is executed.

7. Automated Website Testing Using An Online Selenium Grid

As new devices enter the mainstream every day, QA teams need to ensure the proper functioning of websites on all of them. Businesses nowadays have to ensure that they facilitate mobile testing and are not glued to their desks. But when the teams don’t specifically test for particular hardware, problems can arise and your users can start using alternative apps due to compromised user experience. Which is why you need to ensure that your test coverage is as wide as possible. However, performing manual website testing can be exhausting and monotonous over time, and this is where automation testing can help you pace your release cycles. There are many cloud-based website testing tools to help you perform automation testing over different areas such as performance testing, accessibility testing, cross browser testing, and more. These website testing tools on the cloud can help you boost your go-to-market rate and deliver web applications much faster.

If we talk about browser compatibility testing then LambdaTest allows you to perform interactive testing over different browsers and OS test environments. This ensures that your web application runs flawlessly by every visitor on your website. And you can fast track your test validation by implementing automation testing from scratch using our Selenium Grid.

8. Test Your Changes Even Before They Go Live In The Production Environment

Bad internal communication has been a cause for so many outages. Especially, if your process and pipeline aren’t made transparent during the test cycles. To make sure your code changes don’t end up abrupting the functionality of your web application, you opt for a locally hosted web applications. The problem of doing it on-site is that every tester is busy with testing their locally hosted web application’s module and then they encounter a UI bug, collect screenshots, write a bug report regarding that and then write email chains regarding the bug, or push it over an agile dashboard. That is a lot of tasks and when too many bugs are encountered then there is a good chance that one of your testers would end up reporting something critical.

Performing locally hosted web application testing on the cloud using website testing tools such as LambdaTest can take away this problem with integrations to multiple third-party tools for CI/CD, project management, bug tracking, instant messaging and so on. You can also use responsive website emulator as an alternative.

9. Consistent and Detailed Test Reporting Dashboard

The secret to successful website testing lies in quickly identifying and addressing issues. But if the testing report comes after the process is complete, it delays the resolution of problems. Website testing on cloud enables real-time report generation. The project team members can collaborate on a test in real-time. This means that the team members can generate test reports at any point during STLC(Software Testing Life Cycle). As a result, it identifies any problems quickly and focuses on rapid resolution.

Another factor is the consistency in test reports when you are working with a pool of remote testers then everyone will prepare a bug and test report according to their own perception and comfort. You are their managing consistency standards before sending the reports to the higher-ups. Website testing tools on cloud offer a consistent dashboard using which you can extract reports for every tester working under your organization.

10. Better Efficiency and IT Management

Cloud-based tools offer better productivity but don’t take as much time as traditional testing tools. They are also free of lengthy setups and installations. As a result of quick testing, the time to market is reduced. Such efficiency provides firms with a major competitive advantage.

In cloud-based testing, employees don’t have to dedicate a lot of time to IT management. With the cloud taking care of installation, adding and replacing users, licensing, and upgrades, employees are free to focus on core company activities. Cloud also offers better reliability than a locally maintained server. This frees up the time of the IT department and enables them to concentrate on improving the end product.

11. Parallel Execution and Generating Real-Time Reports

Website testing on cloud-based Selenium Grid can help you trim down your test execution time by multiple folds, with the help of parallel test execution. This means that you can run tests on multiple configurations and environments simultaneously. A cloud offers simulated network conditions to try different OS, device, and browser combinations for testing. To top it off you can leverage Selenium automation testing tools for leveraging parallel testing to reduce your go-to-market launch time.

Note- Proxy object is a A Proxy object allows custom methods to be defined for fundamental operations (e.g. 'get', 'set', 'has', etc.). Useful for logging, profiling, debugging, or implementing object visualization tools.

How Jack Benefitted From Website Testing On The Cloud?

Let us understand this with the help of a story where Jack is a QA Lead who wishes to perform cross browser testing for his web application. However, Jack works in a startup who manages a team of freelance web testers who are testing different modules of the application remotely. Jack is troubled while managing these different testers and is spending most of his time in managing different bugs reported by different testers until he landed on LambdaTest.

LambdaTest provided Jack the option to perform cross browser testing on the cloud on over 3000+ real browsers. He was able to add all of his remote testers under a single organization and could collaborate with them better by leveraging cloud-based website testing with in-built functionality to highlight and mark any UI bug that is encountered while testing. Jack was also impressed by the feature to log any UI bug directly onto his favorite project management tool, in just a single click.

That wasn’t all. Jack wanted to make up for the loss of time that happened due to mismanagement in the past, so he leverages LambdaTest’s Selenium Grid to allow his pool of testers to perform Selenium automation testing in parallel. To his surprise, he favored the website testing on the cloud a lot more than how he used to do, on-site. Especially, due to the hassle of eliminating the need of IT professionals to make sure the requirements of Selenium Grid infrastructure are not failing. Also, the hassle of keeping track of new devices and browsers that were launched in the market. LambdaTest addressed all the latest additions of browsers and operating systems as soon as they were introduced in the market, allowing his team to focus only on testing, without worrying about anything else.

Website Testing On the Cloud: Paving The Way For Enhanced Web Applications

Cloud-based testing combats traditional testing as the scaling capacity is greater than conventional testing. This way, the return on investment is higher. As firms move towards agile, teams can adopt website testing on the cloud to achieve faster and efficient workflows. Every firm is looking forward to building cost-efficient apps with less operation and maintenance expenses. But the key is to achieve that goal without any compromise in quality. Therefore, to ensure building high-quality apps without breaking your bank, you must give cloud-based testing a try!

Top 9 Best Practices To Avoid Browser Compatibility Issues

Praveen Mishra — Fri, 28 Jan 2022 13:07:42 +0000

As per Wikipedia, Google has released 39 versions of the Google Chrome browser in the last 5 years. Similarly, Chrome competitors i.e. Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Safari, Edge are also trying to match up to the release pace in order to dominate the browser wars. Looking at the statistics, we can say that a new browser version is released almost every month.

Note - SVG SMIL animation method allows you to use animation elements (animate, animateMotion, etc.) to animate your SVG images.

Every web browser has different rendering engines that are responsible for compiling and presenting your web application to your visitors. Now, each rendering engine has a unique way of interpreting HTML, CSS, and JavaScript which is why you need to perform cross browser testing to ensure a pixel-perfect UI to your website visitors. These rendering engines vary in every new release version of a browser.

If your website is not ready for the latest browser version, then chances are that you are going to collide into cross browser compatibility bugs, which can ultimately affect your business, your reputation, your branding, or worst your customers.

Now, I know that ensuring your website is cross browser bug-proof can be a tough ask. However, following some best practices can certainly help you to minimize such issues in the future. This is why I thought of sharing some cool tips with you that can help you avoid cross browser compatibility issues on your website.

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You can zoom to view this image 👇

Share this Image On Your Site

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<script async src="//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js" charset="UTF-8"></script>

Note- let allows you to declare variables that are only valid within the scope of the block statement or expression on which it is used.

11 Ways To Manage Distributed Testing Teams Effectively

Praveen Mishra — Thu, 27 Jan 2022 13:30:16 +0000

With the outbreak of COVID-19, organizations all over the world are forced to ask their employees to work from home. It’s likely that you haven’t worked with a completely distributed team, let alone manage one. For testing teams, who usually share an office, this brings a new set of challenges-How to monitor your testing teams’ efficiency when you can’t supervise them directly? How to keep a track of tasks of your distributed testing teams?

According to Julie Wilson, founder of the Institute for Future Learning,

“Managing a virtual team requires managers to double down on the fundamentals of good management, including establishing clear goals, running great meetings, communicating clearly, and leveraging team members’ individual and collective strengths.”

Even though Wilson’s points are true, it is still a tremendous challenge to make the switch to manage distributed testing teams. Here, in this article, I’ll share 11 tips to help you make a switch to a completely distributed testing teams.

What Are The Challenges Involved in Distributed Testing Teams?

Before I share the tips to manage distributed testing teams, let’s start with certain challenges you might face while making the switch to managing distributed testing teams.

Balancing The Workloads Of Team Members

A major challenge while managing distributed testing teams, is distributing tasks to team members. One team member might be swamped with work, while another has a lot of free time in their bandwidth. It’s better to keep a track of all the tasks performed by team members. So that the workload might be balanced, while ensuring better efficiency and low burnout.

Continuous Collaboration Between Team Members

While performing testing it is of paramount importance to know what features the team is performing tests on, so that there is no overlap between the work. But with distributed teams this challenge increases, due to lack of constant communication between team members and team leads. Collaboration should not just be within the testing teams, but also with the developer team as well.

Supervising The Progress Of Your Testing Strategy

With distributed testing teams, it becomes a big challenge to make sure that the entire team is on the same page and working towards the same goal. This is why it becomes vital to ensure that your test strategy is being carried out as you had envisioned.

Quieter Members Tend To Hideaway

Not every team member is vocal in team meetings, some tend to keep a low profile, letting the more vocal team members take the lead. But it is important that they contribute as well, this can be done by directing specific questions at them during the sessions to keep them involved.

Also Note - Base64 decoding is an easy way to make your data more compact for uploading or transferring.

Handling Different Time Zones

A lot of testing teams have to collaborate with stakeholders present in different time zones. So we need to make sure that the team manages their time accordingly and communicate the same to the team in order to avoid any confusion.

Tips to Manage Distributed Testing Teams

One of the best things to manage your distributed testing teams is to build a team culture that focuses on the needs and skills of your team members and implements processes that help you manage them better. Some of the valuable tips that you can follow in order to achieve your goals are:

1. Foster Constant Communication

While working in an office, employees constantly communicate with other team members. For instance, they can talk during regular meetings, while having coffee at the pantry, or via Slack. But, with distributed teams, constant communication becomes a challenge. So, as a team leader, it’s your responsibility to make sure that the team is able to communicate seamlessly.

Testing teams require continuous communication to ensure that tests are being executed timely, and bugs are being addressed. There are a few steps that you can follow to enable constant communication in the team, which includes:

Ask your team to share their phone numbers, email IDs, or Skype ID with each other to make sure that the team is always connected.
Encourage your team to use Skype on the phone as well, rather than relying on email, as every employee has access to their phones most of the time, even when they are not using their desktop.
Utilise communication tools like Slack, Skype, Microsoft Teams, FaceTime, to help establish constant communication with the team in a more accessible and cheaper way.

2. Utilising Cloud Selenium Grid For Test Automation

By moving to a distributed testing environment, we lose any access to any in house device farms and local Selenium Grid. Every remote tester would need to set up their own local infrastructure. With a local Selenium Grid, you can not cover all the major OS and browser versions.

An online Selenium Grid would not only give you the ability to scale your testing efforts, but also help you save time by running parallel tests. You can utilize LambdaTest to perform cross browser testing for your web application on 3000+ real OS and browsers. It also lets you Test your Native, Hybrid, and Web Apps on real and virtual device cloud with iOS Automation Testing.

With LambdaTeset, you can take automated screenshots of your website over 25 different devices at once. In case you find any bug, you can mark the bug and share it with your team to your choice of project management tools. You can even use the LambdaTest Chrome extension or WordPress extension to take the screenshot of your website.

You can find bugs early in the development by using the LambdaTest tunnel, you can test your locally hosted web applications on 3000+ browsers.

Also note:- Prettify JSON - JSON is a common format for storing data, but it can be hard to read. Prettify JSON will indent the JSON file, make sure stuff is lined up in a similar manner, and will put closing parenthesis in the same space every time.

3. Daily and Weekly Standups

As I’ve mentioned in the previous point that constant communication is important for any team to perform efficiently. But even this communication needs to have a structure to make sure they are providing any value. Endless meetings without any agenda can kill productivity and take an ample amount of time from your bandwidth.

A weekly standup with the entire team to discuss team strategy and important updates can be a good way to get the entire team on the same page. They are also a good way to summarise the tasks done in the week and to discuss the strategy and task allotment for the coming week.

Similarly, daily standup can be done via Slack to share the updates on the tasks with the team or sharing challenges faced with the team so that they can pitch in to propose a solution.

4. Inform Employees About Their Tasks As Well As Others

If you are handling a large team, then it is not feasible to address everyone separately about the tasks. So, what you can do is arrange a video conference or group chat every morning to ask employees about their day-to-day tasks.

Also, make sure that everyone attends the video conferences so that they can learn what other team members are working on. But, make sure you keep the video conferences short and focused, instead of turning them into endless or boring discussions.

You can also find other ways to keep your team members informed about the work progress so that they can focus on finishing their respective tasks at a time. To do so, you can take help from virtual task boards and project management tools like Trello or Asana that will help you promote realistic planning.

Work visibility works as a great tool to encourage your employees to finish their tasks timely. Moreover, it allows senior employees to analyze the tasks performed by their juniors and help them if they face any issue.

5. Keeping Clear and Realistic Expectations

It’s easy to misinterpret a message or an email while working remotely. Instructions can be misunderstood in the case of a distributed testing teams, this often results in confusion and disrupts the workflow. This is why it is important that the team is informed about any task or deadlines clearly with agreement on the same.

Expectations must be clear and measurable so that the team knows what they have to accomplish. There should be clear KPIs and deadlines to avoid any confusion so that employees also know what to do to achieve their deliverables.

6. Trust Your Team, But Check In From Time to Time

Even though just because you’re sharing an office with the team doesn’t mean the better productivity of your team, but it’s always easy to keep track on what tasks are being done.

To manage distributed testing teams it is important to use project management tools such as JIRA, Asana to keep track of the tasks allocated and stay connected with the team. It’s not about micromanagement but rather to identify if someone needs any help.

7. Agree on Time Boundaries

It’s hard to achieve work-life balance when you are working from home all the time. As you might lose the track of when the work starts or when it ends. And, not all of us have a home office, and you might even use the same laptop for work and personal use, making it even more difficult to disconnect when you’re done with work. To counter this, it is important that you establish time boundaries.

8. Offer Self-Sufficiency

If you are using agile testing methodologies, then providing autonomy to team members could bring your test management to the next level. Earlier, it was not feasible with the traditional Waterfall setups, as teams required continuous management oversight to ensure that everything is happening as expected.

A move to agile methodologies has made it easier for QA testing teams to work side-by-side with developers, which means stakeholders don’t need to monitor their teams while allowing them to encourage a more autonomous and self-sufficient culture.

There are various benefits of having an autonomous testing team, such as improved flexibility, collaboration, accountability, overall creativity, and shared responsibility, even if the team is distributed across various locations. It also helps businesses achieve their development goals and focus on the quality of products that meet user expectations.

9. Know Your Team Members Personally

In order to maintain a flawless work culture, even for distributed testing teams, it is crucial to know your employees personally. Though it is not possible to meet your distributed testing team on a daily basis, you can still schedule a trip to meet your team members in person. Doing so will help your team members realize that you really care about them, and you appreciate their working efforts.

Developing personal relationships with your team members helps in building trust and bridges cultural differences, which allow employees to be more confident and open about their opinions. Besides, if it’s possible, then encourage your employees to work on personal projects, it helps them learn new skills and keep their creative juices flowing.

However, make sure that these personal meetings are not limited to team leaders and managers; you must treat all your employees equally so that they don’t feel separated from the rest of the team members. You can also establish an exchange program that allows employees to work with other team members at different locations for 2-3 weeks every year. It will help employees know each other personally.

Note - SVG in HTML img element - You can now display SVG images directly in your HTML documents, rather than inline it into the document itself.

10. Ensure That All The Teams Are Informed About The Project Details

When working with multiple teams, there is always one or more teams that have a small or no role in the testing process, and they might feel disconnected if you don’t share 100% details of the project with them. Thus, it’s crucial to inform all your teams about the testing project that is currently under progress.

It usually happens when one testing team is working with the development team on the same site, and the ‘away’ team feels disconnected from the project. To keep your ‘away’ team morale high, you can do multiple things, such as:

Ensure that every testing team has direct access to the development team they are working with, whether it’s via Skype, Slack, Microsoft Team, or Video Calls.
Arrange weekly video conferences with other teams that are not linked to the development like marketing, finance, and sales teams to inform them about the project details and progress.

It will help you keep every member on the same page while eliminating the connection gaps between teams.

11. Use A Testing Platform To Manage Your Testing Efforts

One of the crucial things to make your employees work together is to offer them a single testing platform, which allows them to communicate as well as work. However, choosing a test management platform is not that simple; there are a number of things to look after, such as:

The testing platform should be accessible to each testing team member, and employees should be comfortable working with it
The platform should be customizable so that all the team members can work in a similar fashion
The information shared on the platform should be accessible to all the distributed testing team members so that they can use it according to their needs

These are a few practices that you can take into consideration to manage your distributed testing team.

All In All

Managing distributed testing teams in the time of this pandemic has become a major challenge for businesses. Team leaders and managers are looking for effective strategies that can help them organize and monitor their teams effectively.

You can manage your distributed testing teams better by establishing clear goals, conducting great meetings, clear communication, and utilizing team members’ individual and collective strengths.

We also explored how communication tools such as Slack and Microsoft Teams can help in boosting communication and how product management tools and cross browser testing platforms can make your life easier.

That’s all for now, if you liked the article, feel free to share it with your friends on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

How To Handle Alerts And Popups In Protractor With Selenium?

Praveen Mishra — Tue, 25 Jan 2022 12:35:49 +0000

There are times in the life-cycle of various web applications where you need to interrupt a message to the user. These may be warnings, alerts or information. Browsers have native dialog boxes, one that you can show to alert users to these important messages using JavaScript.

Suppose you fill in an application form and accidentally miss out on a couple of details. How do you know this unless there is a notification alert or a pop-up window? Or If we test a web application using Selenium JavaScript and try logging in to a web site, but do not add an email ID or password to the required fields, the program sends an alert. This is precisely what I will be talking about today. I will be performing Selenium test automation using Protractor to handle alerts and pop-ups.

In this Selenium Protractor tutorial, I’ll explain in detail about handling alerts and pop-ups in Selenium. If you are not familiar with running test scripts on Selenium Protractor, you can refer to our previous article on Automation testing with Selenium Protractor.

Why Do You Need To Test Alerts And Popups?

Alerts and pop-up are widely used to issue warnings to the user or asking permissions from them. They allow us to take user’s permission for certain actions on the web page.

Let’s take a scenario to make things simple. You want to log in to a website, but if you enter the wrong email ID or password to the required fields, you’ll get an alert stating the wrong email or password. Alerts and popups help in establishing user flow in web application and notify them in case something goes wrong, this is you should be handling alerts and popups in Selenium.

There can be several instances that cause an alert to popup in protractors when browsing web pages. However, the most commonly observed classification of alerts is observed during execution of actions such as:

To show a message or important alert to the user
To notify the user about an update.
To show error and notify the user in case of incorrect data entry.
To show a message on saving of certain information.

With that said, it is important to note that Protractor allows you to automate testing using Selenium to handle alerts and pop-ups of your web-app.

Here’s a short glimpse of the Selenium JavaScript 101 certification from LambdaTest:

Handling Alerts in Selenium Protractor

The purpose of alerts on a webpage is to drive the attention of the user. If an alert is present on a webpage the user may have to input operation in order to address such alerts.

The formation of Alerts on a web page is done utilizing the JavaScript framework. The characteristics of alerts often block the source page and force the intended user to read the alert before they can access the web page.

The Alerts in the protractor framework are not part of a window therefore they cannot be handled by utilization of JavaScript Executor.
In Alerts one cannot write Xpaths and the same cannot be identified through inspecting tools.
The characteristic of Alerts block the operation webpage and does not allow the performance of any task on the web page unless the alert is handled on a priority basis.
If a user attempts to proceed on the webpage without prior handling of the Alert popup then they may receive “Unhandled Alert Error”.

Alerts can be classified into the following types:

Prompt
Alerts
Confirmation Dialogue

These alerts are further explained in detail in this Selenium Protractor tutorial below:

Prompt

The prompt alert is utilized to derive value from the user in a text format. It contains a text bar in which the user can input their values. This alert type is not commonly used in webpage alerts.

Alert

This type of alert() method ideally displays a message box with an “OK” button integrated with the dialogue box. This method is utilized with the intent to inform the target user of any specific operational details or changes therewith. Examples of alerts can be : Successfully Loaded webpage or any other database information alerts.

The presence of the alert command is solely to inform the user of existing information. The command can be created by utilizing alert(“message”) in JavaScript. The Alert Pop-up can be handled clicking on the “X” or “OK” command.

Confirmation Dialogue

The confirmation alert is based on the incidence of the dialogue box information being true or false. This alert type is embedded with two commands “OK” or “Cancel”. This is a choice based command box in which the user determines the correctness of the information by clicking on “OK” or “Cancel”.

Handling Alerts In Selenium Protractor Using Alert Class

In Alert Class, the user is presented with four methods in handling alerts in Selenium Protractor. The user may dismiss, accept, retrieve details, or send key values with intent to handle the alerts on a web page.

Alert Class Methods:

dismiss()
accept()
sendKeys()
getText()

First, we have to create the object in the Alert Class for handling alerts in Selenium. The same can be executed by entering the command:

 Alert alert = new Alert() ;

Once the object command is executed we need to direct the command to the webpage in which the operation is required to be performed for handling alerts and popups in Selenium. This is because the object command merely contains the memory address.

Next, we will direct the browser object to the Alert class, so that it identifies the browser (Chrome, Firefox) on which it has to create its operation.

var abc :Alert = browser.switchTo().alert();
// dynamic javascript to switch to alert
var abc = browser.switchTo().alert();

dismiss() Alert Class Methods in Selenium Protractor

The dismiss() alert class method is used to close the alert for handling alerts in Selenium. It operates by clicking on the “X” button in the prompt. This method is functional for all alert types: prompt, alert and confirmation dialogue box. The protractor web driver uses a void dismiss() command to cancel the alert.

driver.switchTo().alert().dismiss();

The following command is executed for handling alert in Selenium Protractor wit dismiss() alert class method:

// import the required modules from the library for handling alerts and popups in Selenium Protractor tutorial//

import { browser, element, by, ExpectedConditions} from 'protractor'

import { Alert } from 'selenium-webdriver';

var script = require (‘protractor’) ;

var webdriver = require (‘selenium-webdriver’) ;

var alert = new Alert();

// defining the test scenario for the use case in protractor //

describe(' Protractor Javascript Selenium Alert Test ', function() {
    // ignore synchronization  //
browser.ignoreSynchronization = true; 

 // information about the test case //
it('Dismiss Alert types in Protractor', function() {
    // set the wait timeout to 10 secs //
        browser.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(10000)
        browser.get("http://the-internet.herokuapp.com ");
        element(by.name("confirmation")).click();
        alert = browser.switchTo().alert();
        alert.dismiss();
    });
});

accept() Alert Class Methods in Selenium Protractor

The accept() alert class method is used to accept an alert and continue with the webpage operation. The accept alert can be utilized for all JavaScript alert types.

An alert command can be executed by using the ale variable for handling alerts in Selenium:

var myAlert = browser.switchTo().alert();
// clicking the 'OK' button will confirm the action //
myAlert.accept();

The following command is executed for handling alerts and popups in Selenium using accept():


// import the required modules from the library for handling alerts and popups in Selenium Protractor tutorial //

import { browser, element, by, ExpectedConditions} from 'protractor'

import { Alert } from 'selenium-webdriver';

var script = require (‘protractor’) ;

var webdriver = require (‘selenium-webdriver’) ;

var myAlert = new Alert();

// defining the test scenario for the use case in protractor //

describe(' Protractor Javascript Selenium Alert Test ', function() {
    // disable synchronization //
    browser.ignoreSynchronization = true;
// information about the test case //
    it(' Accept Alert types in Protractor ', function() {
// set the wait timeout to 10 secs //
        browser.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(10000)
        browser.get("http://the-internet.herokuapp.com ");
        element(by.name("alert")).click();
        myAlert = browser.switchTo().alert();
       // clicking the 'OK' button will confirm the action //
        myAlert.accept();
    });
});

sendKeys() Alert Class Methods in Selenium Protractor

The sendKeys() command can help the user to set certain values to the prompt. The nature of the sendKeys() command is to input value based responses. It can handle all the JavaScript based alerts.

The following command is executed to launch handle sendKeys() Alert Class Methods in Protractor:

// import the required modules from the library for handling alerts and popups in Selenium//

import { browser, element, by, ExpectedConditions} from 'protractor'

import { Alert } from 'selenium-webdriver';

var script = require (‘protractor’) ;

var webdriver = require (‘selenium-webdriver’) ;

var myAlert = new Alert();

// defining the Selenium test automation scenario for handling alerts and popups in Selenium //

describe(' Protractor Javascript Selenium Alert Test ', function() {

    browser.ignoreSynchronization = true; // disable synchronization //
// it contains information about the test case //
    it(' Send Keys Alert types in Protractor ', function() {
// set the wait timeout to 10 secs //
        browser.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(10000)
        browser.get("http://the-internet.herokuapp.com ");
        element(by.name("confirmation")).click();
        myAlert = browser.switchTo().alert();
        // set text to the prompt
        myAlert.sendKeys("Protractor Test Successful");
    });
});

Note- UnsupportedCommandException - The WebDriver error - unknown command error, happens when a command or HTTP endpoint is not recognized by the driver.

Handling Popups in Selenium Protractor

Popups are windows that pop up on your screen when you perform a certain action on the web application. These can be when you download a file, or when you enter a password protected website, there are several such cases and i’ll share them with you in the next section of this Selenium Protractor tutorial.

While performing Selenium test automation on a web page, a tester may needs to be handling popups in Selenium of different types, these are:

Download popups
Authentication popups
Confirmation popups
Alert popups
Hidden Division popups
Upload popups
Calendar popups

Next, I’ll go into handling popups in Selenium, here are some of the popups you should know how to handle:

Hidden Division Popups

Hidden division popup is the newer version of protractor alert that has gained preference with new developers. This alert is an HTML code that stays hidden at the beginning of the loading of a webpage. The execution of the hidden division pop-up is activated by clicking on a pre-set trigger tab. popups such as contact forms; error messages are the most common form of hidden division popups.

A hidden division popup can be identified by the following characteristics:

It is not a form of JavaScript pop-up
It can integrate another division of pop-up with the initial alert dialogue.
It can be customized to contain a scroll bar for extended content.
Hidden division popups are customizable and resizable
These popups are locked in a single space and cannot be moved by the user.
These popups can be inspected
These popups do not allow the user to operate further until the alert is handled.
Non-handling the popup triggers selenium to throws ElementNotClickableError

The complete command for hidden division popups that is executed for handling popups in Selenium :

// import the required modules from the library or handling popups in Selenium //

import { browser, element, by, ExpectedConditions, protractor} from 'protractor'

import { Alert } from 'selenium-webdriver';

var script = require (‘protractor’) ;

var webdriver = require (‘selenium-webdriver’) ;

var myAlert = new Alert();

// defining the Selenium test automation scenario for the use case in protractor for or handling popups in Selenium//

describe(' Protractor Javascript Selenium Alert Test ', function() {
    browser.ignoreSynchronization = true; // disable synchronization //

// it contains information about the Selenium test automation case for or handling popups in Selenium//   
    it(' Hidden Division Alert types in Protractor ', function() {
// set the wait timeout to 10 secs //
        browser.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(10000)
        browser.get("http://the-internet.herokuapp.com ");
        element(by.className("cd-popup-trigger")).click()
        element(by.xpath("//input[@type='text']")).sendKeys(" Protractor hidden division alert in Test ")
// adding sleep for validation purposes //
        browser.sleep(5000);
    });
});

Authentication Popups

The key usage of authentication popups is to authenticate user access. These popups are generally observed in password-protected pages and consist of a username and password dialogue boxes.

An authentication popup can be identified by the following characteristics:

The elements of the authentication pop-up overlay cannot be inspected by the user.
This pop-up is displayed on the occurrence of the loading of the web-page.
The page can only be accessed through the input of valid credentials.
The pop-up may or may not be movable as per the browser configuration.
The UI of the pop-up is highly customizable.

The solution to handle this type of alert in selenium is to enter valid credentials along with the URL. The syntax for password and username in authentication pop-ups are:

driver.get(protocol://Usename:Password@URL Address);

The complete command for Authentication popups for handling popups in Selenium is:

// import the required modules from the library for handling popups in Selenium //

import { browser, element, by, ExpectedConditions, protractor} from 'protractor'

import { Alert } from 'selenium-webdriver';

var script = require (‘protractor’) ;

var webdriver = require (‘selenium-webdriver’) ;

var myAlert = new Alert();

// defining the Selenium test automation scenario for the use case in protractor for handling popups in Selenium //

describe(' Protractor Javascript Selenium Alert Test ', function() {
    browser.ignoreSynchronization = true; // disable synchronization //

// it contains information about the Selenium test automation case //
 it(' Authentication Alert types operation in Protractor ', function() {
// set the wait timeout to 10 secs //
    browser.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(30000)
    browser.get("http://the-internet.herokuapp.com/basic_auth");
    browser.getTitle().then(function(title){
        if(title == "Selenium Authentication is Successful"){
            console.log("Login successful")
        }
        else{
            console.log("Login Failed")
        }
        })
    });
});

On successful login, through entering of valid credentials the webpage can be accessed and the alert can be handled for Selenium test automation.

Upload Popups

The upload pop-up is an alert type that is triggered when the user needs to upload a certain file to the web-page. This pop-up is customized to initially ask permission for local storage access to browse files that need to be uploaded. The upload command box consists of the “browse/choose” tab. clicking on the tab triggers a system based operation in which the local storage of the user is opened.

Once the trigger command opens the local storage the user needs to select the file that needs to be uploaded and click on the “ok” confirmation button. This action will successfully upload the target file to the webpage. The user will further need to click on the “upload file” button in order to send the file to the storage database of the webpage.

To execute this command the sendkeys() method can be efficiently utilized. The detailed code to execute the sendkey() command for handling popups in Selenium for dialogue box is:

// import the required modules from the library for handling alerts and popups in Selenium //

import { browser, element, by, ExpectedConditions, protractor} from 'protractor'

import { Alert } from 'selenium-webdriver';

var script = require (‘protractor’) ;

var webdriver = require (‘selenium-webdriver’) ;

var myAlert = new Alert ();

// defining the Selenium test automation scenario for the use case in protractor for handling popups in Selenium //

describe(' Protractor JavaScript Selenium Alert Test ', function() {
    browser.ignoreSynchronization = true; // disable synchronization //

// it contains information about the Selenium test automation case //

    it(' Upload Alert types operation in Protractor ', function() {
// set the wait timeout to 10 secs //
        browser.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(30000)
        browser.get(" https://www.google.com ");
        element(by.name("upload")). sendKeys("myfile.txt")
      // adding sleep for validation purposes //
        browser.sleep(10000)

    });
});

Integrating With Cloud Selenium Grid And Other Tools

We constantly look for ways to help us increase our test coverage and enhance our test case while running our Selenium test automation scripts. To support this, there are several tools to scale our testing efforts. The Protractor is capable of integrating with many other popular tools and platforms such as Github, Jenkins, Selenium Grid etc. It’s best that we utilize this capability of Protractor to scale your testing efforts.

By providing substantial added value, these tools make our Protractor test script more efficient and reliable. Whether a novice or a professional with Protractor, one of the best tools to get started is to deploy the application on Online Selenium Grid like LambdaTest and quickly monitor our testing very easily. Integrating LambdaTest in our Protractor scripts allows us to improve our test coverage and ensure that we’ve covered our browser matrix.

By utilizing a cloud Selenium Grid, you can run test scripts on 3000+ real browsers and their different versions, which helps us to adequately construct the test case and maximize our test coverage. You can further use a Selenium Grid for handling alerts and popups in Selenium over different browsers and OS combinations.

Integrating Protractor with a cloud Selenium Grid is easy, you just have to make changes to specification files as only a config file is required, which will have all the connection information, the hub, and the access key needed to connect to the LambdaTest network. Therefore, when combined with the internal capabilities of Protractor, it gives greater flexibility to handle our tests and run parallel tests, which will exponentially improve our test run speed. Here is the link to visit LambdaTest Selenium desired capabilities generator.

Below is our updated script for this Selenium Protractor tutorial on handling alerts and popups with the required changes:

// test_config.js //

// The test_config.js file servers as a configuration file for our test case for handling alerts and popups in Selenium //

LT_USERNAME = process.env.LT_USERNAME || "irohitgoyal"; // Lambda Test User name
LT_ACCESS_KEY = process.env.LT_ACCESS_KEY || "123456789"; // Lambda Test Access key

exports.capabilities = {
  'build': ' Automation Selenium Webdriver Test Script ', // Build Name to be display in the test logs
  'name': ' Protractor Selenium Test on Chrome',  // The name of the test to distinguish amongst test cases //
  'platform':'Windows 10', //  Name of the Operating System
  'browserName': 'chrome', // Name of the browser
  'version': '79.0', // browser version to be used
  'visual': false,  // flag to check whether to take step by step screenshot
  'network':false,  // flag to check whether to capture network logs
  'console':false, // flag to check whether to capture console logs.
  'tunnel': false // flag to check if it is required to run the localhost through the tunnel
  };

// setting required for the config parameters for handling alerts and popups in Selenium //
exports.config = {
   directConnect: true,

   // Desired Capabilities that are passed as an argument to the web driver instance for handling alerts and popups in Selenium.//
   capabilities: {
      'browserName': 'chrome'  // name of the browser used to test //
   },

   // Flavour of the framework to be used for our test case //
   framework: 'jasmine',

   // The patterns which are relative to the current working directory when  

protractor methods are invoked //

   specs: ['test_script.js'],
// overriding default value of allScriptsTimeout parameter //
      allScriptsTimeout: 999999,
      jasmineNodeOpts: {
// overriding default value of defaultTimeoutInterval parameter //
      defaultTimeoutInterval: 999999
   },
   onPrepare: function () {
      browser.manage().window().maximize();
      browser.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(5000);
   }
};


// test_script.js //

// import the required modules from the library //

import { browser, element, by, ExpectedConditions} from 'protractor'

import { Alert } from 'selenium-webdriver';

var script = require (‘protractor’) ;

var webdriver = require (‘selenium-webdriver’) ;

var myAlert = new Alert();

// Build the web driver that we will be using in Lambda Test
var buildDriver = function(caps) {
  return new webdriver.Builder()
    .usingServer(
      "http://" +
      LT_USERNAME +
      ":" +
      LT_ACCESS_KEY +
      "@hub.lambdatest.com/wd/hub"
    )
    .withCapabilities(caps)
    .build();
};


describe(' Protractor Javascript Selenium Alert Test ', function() {
    // disable synchronization //
    browser.ignoreSynchronization = true;


// adding the before an event that builds the driver and triggers before the test execution for handling alerts and popups in Selenium//
  beforeEach(function(done) {
    caps.name = this.currentTest.title;
    driver = buildDriver(caps);
    done();
  });

  it(' Accept Alert types in Protractor ', function() {
// set the wait timeout to 10 secs //
        browser.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(10000)
        browser.get("http://the-internet.herokuapp.com ");
        element(by.name("alert")).click();
        myAlert = browser.switchTo().alert();
       // clicking the 'OK' button will confirm the action //
        myAlert.accept();
    });
});

Note:- WebDriverException -The WebDriver error - unknown error, happens when the driver tries to process a command and an unspecified error occurs.
The error can generally be isolated to the specific driver. It is a good practice to read the error message for any pointers on why the error occurred.

Wrapping It Up!

Now, this takes us to the conclusion of this Selenium Protractor tutorial on handling alerts and popups in Selenium protractor. There are several options for notifying users with critical information about the web application flow and it should be kept in mind while writing scripts for automated browser testing. I explored how browsers have native alert dialogs that can be used to give prompts using JavaScript and also create our own custom alerts and popups. But you need to keep in mind that the ability to show messages to the user is not overused as this may annoy the user and ruin their experience.

I hope you liked this Selenium Protractor tutorial on handling alerts and popups in Selenium Protractor. Finally, if you think this Selenium Protractor tutorial was helpful to you, you can share it with your peers and colleagues who are facing the same problem and would benefit by reading this article. You can even retweet us or share our post on LinkedIn. That’s all folks. Happy Testing!!!?

How To Use Assertions In TestNG With Selenium

Praveen Mishra — Tue, 18 Jan 2022 13:54:11 +0000

Testing can be performed in a manual as well as automated manner. Irrespective of the type of testing approach being used, it is necessary to know the point at which the tests have to be halted (or stopped).

When doing Selenium automation testing, we might come across a number of scenarios where a decision needs to be made on the subsequent execution of the tests. This is especially important in cases where the result of the previous test execution has resulted in a failure. If the issue encountered is a minor one, we can still proceed with the execution; otherwise, it is recommended to halt the test execution.

This is where Asserts in Selenium WebDriver comes to the rescue. The test execution halts when the condition (part of the assert) is not met. Thus, when performing Selenium automation testing with TestNG, assertions can be used for taking relevant steps when an issue is encountered.

In this Selenium TestNG tutorial, we look at what are assertions in TestNG, different types of TestNG assertions, and how they can be used in scenarios pertaining to Selenium automation testing.

What are Assertions in TestNG?

Every test automation framework (e.g., TestNG, JUnit, PyTest, etc.) provides a mechanism to raise asserts. Hence, the generic concept of Asserts and Verify in Selenium is synonymous across different automation frameworks.

As far as the TestNG framework is concerned, asserts in TestNG are used for validating the scenario under test. The outcome of the test can be decided based on the assertion status. TestNG assertion is raised if the ‘achieved test result’ is not the same as the ‘expected test result.’

Assert Class in TestNG provides different methods that can be used to raise asserts. For using TestNG assertions, all you need to do is import the org.testng.Assert package.

Let’s take a simple test scenario where the page title of the LambdaTest homepage has to be validated before further tests can be executed.

Here expected result would be ‘Most Powerful Cross Browser Testing Tool Online | LambdaTest.’ The following cases can arise during the process of test execution:

Case 1

Fetched Title: Most Powerful Cross Browser Testing Tool Online | LambdaTest
Expected Title: Most Powerful Cross Browser Testing Tool Online | LambdaTest
Test case result: Passed, as fetched title matches the expected title

Case 2

Fetched Title: Most Powerful Cross Browser Testing Tool Online | LambdaTest
Expected Title: Most Powerful Cross Browser Testing Tool Online
Test case result: Failed, as fetched title does not match with the expected title

The above example that demonstrated TestNG assertions gives an overall idea about the what & how of assertions. Let’s look at the syntax and other internals of assertions in TestNG.

Syntax of TestNG assertions

The Assert package in TestNG provides methods(or options) to raise assertions. Shown below is the generic syntax of TestNG assertions:

Assert.methodName(actual, expected);

Assert is the Class provided by the TestNG framework
methodName is the name of the method that can be used for implementing TestNG assertions
actual is the first parameter that describes the value that the user gets during the execution of the test script
expected is the second parameter that describes what the user should get to validate the functionality of the test case

What are Assertion errors?

An Assertion Error, which is a subclass of the Error class, is thrown whenever an issue is encountered during the process of Selenium automation testing.

Let’s take a look at a sample implementation on TestNG assertions where the Selenium test raises an Assertion Error due to an error in the code.

The example shown below is run on the LambdaTest cloud Selenium Grid. A cloud-based Selenium Grid helps improve browser and test coverage by helping run tests on a range of browser and OS combinations. In addition, the overall process of Selenium Java automation testing using TestNG can be expedited by leveraging parallel testing in TestNG with Selenium.

package com.lambdatest;
import java.net.URL;
import java.util.ArrayList;
import org.openqa.selenium.JavascriptExecutor;
import org.openqa.selenium.remote.DesiredCapabilities;
import org.openqa.selenium.remote.RemoteWebDriver;
import org.testng.Assert;
import org.testng.annotations.AfterTest;
import org.testng.annotations.Test;

public class AssertionTestOnLambdatest
{
   private static RemoteWebDriver driver;
   private static String status;

   @Test
   public void hardAssertion() throws Exception
   {
       String username = "Enter your user name";
       String accesskey = "Enter your access key";
       String gridURL = "@hub.lambdatest.com/wd/hub";

       DesiredCapabilities capabilities = new DesiredCapabilities();

       capabilities.setCapability("browserName", "chrome");
       capabilities.setCapability("version", "latest");
       capabilities.setCapability("platform", "win10");
       capabilities.setCapability("build", "AssertionError Test");
       capabilities.setCapability("name", "AssertionError Test");
       capabilities.setCapability("visual", true);
       driver=new RemoteWebDriver(new URL("https://"+username+":"+accesskey+gridURL), capabilities);

       driver.get("https://www.lambdatest.com/");

       String expectedtitle="Most Powerful Cross Browser Testing Tool Online | LambdaTe";

       String actualtitle = driver.getTitle();
       ArrayList<String> exceptionCapture = new ArrayList<>();
       try
       {
           Assert.assertEquals(actualtitle, expectedtitle);
           status="passed";
       }
       catch(AssertionError e)
       {
           status = "failed";
           exceptionCapture.add(e.getMessage());
           ((JavascriptExecutor) driver).executeScript("lambda-exceptions", exceptionCapture);
       }
   }

   @AfterTest
   public void tearDown() throws Exception
   {

       if (driver != null) {
           ((JavascriptExecutor) driver).executeScript("lambda-status=" + status);
           driver.quit();
       }

   }
}

Since the tests are running on a cloud Selenium Grid, an instance of Remote WebDriver in Selenium is created before implementing the actual test logic. Then, relevant Selenium methods are used to access and perform operations on the WebElements in the DOM.

The respective methods are placed under relevant TestNG annotations, thereby improving the readability of the tests. However, as seen in the implementation, the fetched title does not match with the expected title, which eventually results in an assertion error.

The rest of the implementation is pretty straightforward, hence we are deep diving into those aspects of the code 🙂

Invoke the following command on the terminal to kick-start the test execution:

mvn test –P single

The test resulted in a failure as a TestNG assertion was raised since the read title did not match with the expected title.

Navigate to the Exception tab in LambdaTest Automation Dashboard to check the details of the TestNG Assertion error.

In the above images, we can clearly see that the expected title and actual title did not match; hence AssertionError is displayed. The noticeable point here is we do not see any clear failure message in all the above outputs. Let’s resolve this problem in the next section.

Here’s a short glimpse of the TestNG certification from LambdaTest:

Note:- TimeBombSkipException - This Class is an extension of SkipException which change the SkipException to Failed status based on time when test trigger timing.

Different Methods in TestNG assertions

TestNG provides different methods to validate the test result during script execution. In this section, we will see the most commonly used assertion methods available for TestNG assertions

Methods	Description
assertEquals(String actual, String expected, String message);	Asserts that two strings are equal. If not, then AssertionError is thrown. Parameters- 'actual: actual value' 'expected: expected value' 'message: message that we want to display in case of failure'
assertEquals(boolean actual, boolean expected, String message);	Asserts that two boolean values are equal. If not, then AssertionError is thrown. Parameters- 'actual: actual value' 'expected: expected value' ' message: message that we want to display in case of failure'
assertEquals(Collection <?> actual, Collection <?> expected, String message);	Asserts that two Collection type objects hold the same elements and in the same order. If not, an AssertionError is thrown. Parameters- 'actual: actual value' 'expected: expected value' 'message: message that we want to display in case of a failure'
assertEqualsNoOrder(Object[] actual, Object[] expected, String message);	Asserts that two arrays contain the same elements in no particular order. If not, an AssertionError is thrown. Parameters- 'actual: actual value' 'expected: expected value' 'message: message that we want to display in case there is a failure'
assertTrue(boolean condition, String message);	Asserts that condition is true. If not, then AssertionError is thrown. Parameters: 'condition: evaluate condition' 'message: Assertion error message in case of a failure.'
assertFalse(boolean condition, String message);	Asserts that condition is false. If not, then AssertionError is thrown. Parameters- 'condition: evaluate the condition' 'message: Assertion error message in case of a failure'
assertNotNull(Object object, String message);	Asserts that an object is not null. If not, then AssertionError is thrown. Parameters- 'object: assertion object' 'message: message that we want to display in case of a failure'
assertNull(Object object, String message);	Asserts that an object is null. If not, then AssertionError is thrown. Parameters- 'object: assertion object' 'message: message that we want to display in case of a failure'
assertNotSame(Object actual, Object expected, String message);	Asserts that two objects do not refer to the same objects. If not, an AssertionError is thrown. Parameters- 'actual: actual value' 'expected: expected value' 'message: message that we want to display in case of a failure'
assertSame(Object actual, Object expected, String message);	Asserts that two objects refer to the same objects. If not, an AssertionError is thrown. Parameters- 'actual: actual value' 'expected: expected value' 'message: message that we want to display in case of a failure'

The “message” parameter is optional in all the above methods.

Assertion Messages in TestNG Tests

TestNG provides the flexibility to add a custom message as a parameter inside the test method. The message helps in better understanding and tracking the reason behind the test failure.

Assert.methodName(actual, expected, message);

We have already discussed the major parameters in the earlier section. The newest parameter, ‘message’ is used for defining the custom message that is displayed in case the test results in a failure.

We now modify the already demonstrated example where a custom ‘message’ is displayed when the TestNG assertion is raised.

package com.lambdatest;

import java.net.URL;
import java.util.ArrayList;
import org.openqa.selenium.JavascriptExecutor;
import org.openqa.selenium.remote.DesiredCapabilities;
import org.openqa.selenium.remote.RemoteWebDriver;
import org.testng.Assert;
import org.testng.annotations.AfterTest;
import org.testng.annotations.Test;

public class AssertionTestOnLambdatest
{

   private static RemoteWebDriver driver;
   private static String status;

   @Test
   public void hardAssertion() throws Exception
   {
       String username = "Enter your user name";
       String accesskey = "Enter your access key";
       String gridURL = "@hub.lambdatest.com/wd/hub";

       DesiredCapabilities capabilities = new DesiredCapabilities();

       capabilities.setCapability("browserName", "chrome");
       capabilities.setCapability("version", "latest");
       capabilities.setCapability("platform", "win10");
       capabilities.setCapability("build", "AssertionError Test");
       capabilities.setCapability("name", "AssertionError Test");
       capabilities.setCapability("visual", true);
       driver=new RemoteWebDriver(new URL("https://"+username+":"+accesskey+gridURL), capabilities);

       driver.get("https://www.lambdatest.com/");

       String expectedtitle="Most Powerful Cross Browser Testing Tool Online | LambdaTe;

       String actualtitle = driver.getTitle();
       ArrayList<String> exceptionCapture = new ArrayList<>();
       try
       {
           Assert.assertEquals(actualtitle, expectedtitle);
           status="passed";
       }
       catch(AssertionError e)
       {
           status = "failed";
           exceptionCapture.add("Title not matched"+" "+e.getMessage());
           ((JavascriptExecutor) driver).executeScript("lambda-exceptions", exceptionCapture);
       }
   }

   @AfterTest
   public void tearDown() throws Exception
   {

       if (driver != null) {
           ((JavascriptExecutor) driver).executeScript("lambda-status=" + status);
           driver.quit();
       }

   }
}

As seen in the execution snapshot, the custom message is printed when the corresponding TestNG assert is raised.

As seen in the ‘Exception’ Tab of the Automation dashboard, the custom message ‘Title not matched’ is printed instead of the rudimentary message that we witnessed in the earlier screenshot.

Different types of TestNG Assertions

Soft Assertions and Hard Assertions are the two main types of Assertions in TestNG. The different types of asserts are defined based on the necessity that the user wants to halt the execution or continue the execution in case there is a failure.

Hard Assertions in TestNG

Hard TestNG Assertions should be used when failure in test execution should halt the overall execution of the test suite. By default, TestNG assertions are ‘hard’ in nature. Hence, you need to import the org.testng.asserts.SoftAssert package if you want to raise Soft TestNG Assertions in your test.

Let’s understand the above concept with the help of an example where the login has to be done before performing any actions on the site. Therefore, there is no point in validating the Home page until a successful login is done. In this case, we can use hard assertions on the Login page so that we would be able to stop our test execution immediately if the login is unsuccessful.

package com.lambdatest;
import java.net.URL;
import java.util.ArrayList;
import org.openqa.selenium.JavascriptExecutor;
import org.openqa.selenium.remote.DesiredCapabilities;
import org.openqa.selenium.remote.RemoteWebDriver;
import org.testng.Assert;
import org.testng.annotations.AfterTest;
import org.testng.annotations.Test;

public class HardAssertTest
{
   private static RemoteWebDriver driver;
  private static String status;
  @Test
  public void hardAssertion() throws Exception
  {
      String username = "user_name";
      //Enter your access key
      String accesskey = "access_key";
      //Enter Grid URL
      String gridURL = "@hub.lambdatest.com/wd/hub";
      //Set Desired capabilities to run on Lambdatest platform
      DesiredCapabilities capabilities = new DesiredCapabilities();
      capabilities.setCapability("browserName", "chrome"); //Set Browser Name
      capabilities.setCapability("version", "latest"); //Set browser version
      capabilities.setCapability("platform", "win10"); // If this cap isn't specified, it will just get the any available one
      capabilities.setCapability("build", "Hard Assert Test");
      capabilities.setCapability("name", "Hard Assert Test");
      capabilities.setCapability("visual", true);

      driver = new RemoteWebDriver(new URL("https://"+username+":"+accesskey+gridURL), capabilities);
      driver.get("https://www.lambdatest.com/");
      // Define expected title
      String expectedtitle = "Most Powerful Cross Browser Testing Tool Online | LambdaTe";
      // Extract Actual title
      String actualtitle = driver.getTitle();
      ArrayList<String> exceptionCapture = new ArrayList<>();
      try
      {
          //Assertion applied to validate the result
          Assert.assertEquals(actualtitle, expectedtitle);
          System.out.println("This statement will not be executed because the previous statement is failed");
          status="passed";
      }
      catch(AssertionError e)
      {
          //Logic to capture Assertion error message with user customized message in exception tab on lambdatest
          status = "failed";
          exceptionCapture.add("Title not matched"+" "+e.getMessage());
          ((JavascriptExecutor) driver).executeScript("lambda-exceptions", exceptionCapture);
      }
   }
   @AfterTest
   public void tearDown() throws Exception
   {
       if (driver != null)
       {
           ((JavascriptExecutor) driver).executeScript("lambda-status=" + status);
               driver.quit();
       }
   }
}

As seen in the screenshot from the automation dashboard, it is evident that the test has failed, and the custom message is printed as a part of the exception message.

Soft Assertions in TestNG

Soft TestNG Assertions are preferred in scenarios where a failure in the test should not result in halting the execution of the other tests in the test suite. Use soft assertions when the failure is not a major one, thereby having minimal (to no) impact on the subsequent tests.

Soft Assert not only asserts a given assertion statement but also provides the flexibility to the user for continuing the execution of the test script even after assertion failure. For implementation, we use the SoftAssert class available in TestNG, and this SoftAssert class extends the Assertion class, which has almost all the assertion methods.

In the case of Soft Assert, TestNG always executes only those test steps that are in between assert statement and assertAll statement. The steps present after the assertAll method will not be executed.

package com.lambdatest;

import java.net.URL;
import java.util.ArrayList;
import org.openqa.selenium.JavascriptExecutor;
import org.openqa.selenium.remote.DesiredCapabilities;
import org.openqa.selenium.remote.RemoteWebDriver;
import org.testng.Assert;
import org.testng.annotations.AfterTest;
import org.testng.annotations.Test;
import org.testng.asserts.SoftAssert;

public class SoftAssertTest
{
   private static RemoteWebDriver driver;
  private static String status;
  @Test
  public void softAssertion() throws Exception
  {
       String username = "user_name";

       //Enter your access key
       String accesskey = "access_key";

       //Enter Grid URL
       String gridURL = "@hub.lambdatest.com/wd/hub";

       //Set Desired capabilities to run on Lambdatest platform
       DesiredCapabilities capabilities = new DesiredCapabilities();

       capabilities.setCapability("browserName", "chrome"); //Set Browser Name
       capabilities.setCapability("version", "latest"); //Set browser version
       capabilities.setCapability("platform", "win10"); // If this cap isn't specified, it will just get the any available one
       capabilities.setCapability("build", "Hard Assert Test");
       capabilities.setCapability("name", "Hard Assert Test");
       capabilities.setCapability("visual", true);

       driver = new RemoteWebDriver(new URL("https://"+username+":"+accesskey+gridURL), capabilities);

       driver.get("https://www.lambdatest.com/");

       // Creating the object of SoftAssert Class
       SoftAssert softassert = new SoftAssert();

       // Define expected title
       String expectedtitle = "Most Powerful Cross Browser Testing Tool Online | LambdaTe";

       // Extract Actual title
       String actualtitle = driver.getTitle();
       // Soft Assertion applied to validate the result
       softassert.assertEquals(actualtitle, expectedtitle,"Title is not Matched");

       System.out.println("This statement will be executed even the previous statement is failed");
   }
   @AfterTest
   public void tearDown() throws Exception
   {
       if (driver != null)
       {
           driver.quit();
       }
   }
}

The execution output shows that a soft assert was raised, and the statement following the assert was also printed on the output console.

Note- CouldNotReadCoreException -It throws when Max value can’t be read by the MaxCore Serialization

Custom Soft Assertions in TestNG

In the previous sections, we demonstrated the implementation of different TestNG asserts, but there might be a need to write our assertions (called Custom Assertions).

We will first create a CustomAssertion class, which extends the SoftAssert class so that we can use all assertion methods in TestNG. For demonstration purposes, we will take the example of the LambdaTest website in which we will validate whether the “Free start testing” button is a button web element or not.

package com.lt.assertions;

import org.openqa.selenium.WebElement;
import org.testng.asserts.SoftAssert;

public class CustomAssertion extends SoftAssert
{
   // We created assertButton in which we will validate whether element is button or not
   public void assertButton(WebElement element)
   {
       // Extract the tagname as well as type of element
       String tagname = element.getTagName();
       String type = element.getAttribute("type");

       // Verify whether tag is button and type is submit
       if(tagname.equals("button") && type.equals("submit"))
       {
           System.out.println("Element is Button, So Assertion Passed");
       }
       else
       {
           // If assertion is failed then we will throw AssertionError
           throw new AssertionError("Element is not Button, So Assertion Failed");
       }
   }
}

Now, we will create the main class where we test the recently created custom assertion. Here, we will inspect elements that we want to test and create the object of the above-created custom assertion class. Finally, with the help of the created object, we will call the method that we created in the custom assertion.

package com.lt.assertions;

import org.openqa.selenium.By;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebElement;
import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.remote.DesiredCapabilities;
import org.openqa.selenium.remote.RemoteWebDriver;

public class TestAssertion
{
   public static void main(String[] args)
   {
       RemoteWebDriver driver;

       String username = "user_name";
      //Enter your access key
      String accesskey = "access_key";
      //Enter Grid URL
      String gridURL = "@hub.lambdatest.com/wd/hub";
      //Set Desired capabilities to run on Lambdatest platform
      DesiredCapabilities capabilities = new DesiredCapabilities();
      capabilities.setCapability("browserName", "chrome"); //Set Browser Name
      capabilities.setCapability("version", "latest"); //Set browser version
      capabilities.setCapability("platform", "win10"); // If this cap isn't specified, it will just get the any available one
      capabilities.setCapability("build", "Hard Assert Test");
      capabilities.setCapability("name", "Hard Assert Test");
      capabilities.setCapability("visual", true);
      driver = new RemoteWebDriver(new URL("https://"+username+":"+accesskey+gridURL), capabilities);

       driver.get("https://www.lambdatest.com/");

       // Inspect the “Free Testing Button” element
       WebElement freetestingbutton = driver.findElement(By.xpath("(//button[contains(text(),\"Start Free Testing\")])[1]"));

       // Creating the object of CustomAssertion class
       CustomAssertion customassert = new CustomAssertion();

       // Calling the custom created method with the help of object
       customassert.assertButton(freetestingbutton);
   }
}

If we run the main class, then we can see our assertion is passed, and the success message is displayed on the console.

If we want to fail the above TestNG assertion, add the following change in the existing implementation:

// Inspect the “Free Testing Button” element
WebElement freetestingbutton = driver.findElement(By.tagName("p"));

Conclusion

In this TestNG tutorial with a focus on TestNG assert, we looked at different asserts and constraints helpful in Selenium automation testing. The reason for using assert in test code is to pause the execution as soon as assert is encountered.

Selenium testing is an essential element in ensuring the effectiveness of test automation. With the combination of cloud-based Selenium testing tools like LambdaTest, development teams can verify product functionalities across several browsers & operating system combinations. However, the core business logic remains intact, with minimal changes required to port the TestNG test code to the remote Selenium Grid.

Let us know the TestNG asserts you have been using in the comments section to learn from each other’s experience.

Happy Testing