& Continuous Learning

I had the opportunity to present at the eleventh Iowa Code Camp on June 8, 2013.  The title of my presentation was "Easy Acceptance Testing." The purpose of the presentation was to discuss an acceptance testing framework that Source Allies, Inc. developed for a partner while working on a large scale web application.

I started the presentation with a discussion on the various types of software testing. Then I focused the discussion on acceptance testing.  I discussed some of the disadvantages and advantages of acceptance testing that I have observed.  I discussed some of the various tools available for acceptance testing like Cucumber, Fitnesse, and Selenium.  Finally, I demonstrated a generic version of the acceptance testing framework we developed for our partner.  The demonstration was executed against a randomly selected website to show how easy it is to create acceptance tests for a web application using this framework.

The framework is written in Groovy and uses Selenium.  It takes advantage of some of the language features of Groovy such as Closures and Delegates to simplify the formation of test cases.  The test cases are defined in an XML format so that they can be easily changed.  The framework also supports nesting test cases inside other test cases.

The presentation slides and generic framework code is available for download on GitHub.