Boozang from the Trenches

Test Automation is a key aspect of delivering high-quality software and reducing time to market. Several tools and approaches are available today, each with its own constraints and specificity. This book introduces Boozang, a codeless web automation tool, using a real-life enterprise project as source for examples.

You'll have the opportunity to learn the basic features of Boozang and how to implement end-to-end automated scenarios, mixing GUI and API actions. Integration with JIRA-XRay and Jenkins is also covered to show how Boozang can be used effectively in an enterprise environment. The book is filled with examples that go beyond the Boozang tool, and cover the setup of a test automation project in a real context, with practical solutions as well as open points for which we are still looking for new ideas.

YOU WILL LEARN HOW TO:

· Install and set up a project with Boozang

· Create a modular test suite and use Gherkin to define scenarios

· Integrate Boozang with JIRA-XRay and work in a team with code branches

· Build a Jenkins pipeline to execute the automated scenarios nightly and reduce the execution time via parallelism

THIS BOOK IS FOR:

Testers and test managers, IT projects leads, Release and Delivery Managers, Developers, and Business Analysts

Gianni is a simple guy from Livorno (a beautiful port city in Tuscany) who never thought he would end up with a Ph.D. at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research, cern.ch) and then working for a prestigious company in Switzerland. But he always knew that at some point in his life, he would have written a book.

In his early career as a software developer, he built some C/C++ code but, pretty soon, debugging null pointer exceptions drove him crazy. He then decided he would be better off testing software rather than building it.

Wherever he worked, he tried to push for automating tests. Because manual testing, let’s be honest, is not fun, and it can be dangerously repetitive. People at work must have fun, if possible. At Touring Club Suisse, he defined an IT Test Strategy stating “Test automation is developers’ stuff” until he discovered Boozang. And then, in his first two hours of using this tool, he thought, “Man, this is fun!”.

Thus, he finally found a good topic for his book.

Part 1: Testing web applications in an Enterprise context, why Boozang Chapter 1: Web Test Automation in an Enterprise environment

CHAPTER GOAL: This chapter introduces basic Test Automation concepts that will be used throughout the book. Besides ISTQB standard terminology, I’ll also cover the constraints typical of an Enterprise environment that might not be the same for small startups and IT giants.

NO OF PAGES 15

SUB -TOPICS

1. Common Test Automation challenges

2. Test levels, test types and testing roles

3. Test automation in agile development

4. Test Automation ROI, theory and practice

Chapter 2: Selenium, best practices and pain points

CHAPTER GOAL: This chapter presents the typical approach to testing web applications with coded solutions like Selenium and highlights the main pain points that could undermine a Test Automation initiative's success.

NO OF PAGES: 5

SUB - TOPICS

1. Locators and Page Objects pattern

2. Browsers and WebDriver compatibility

3. Timing and waits

4. Data management

5. Reporting and script readability

6. Development skills

Chapter 3: Meet Boozang

CHAPTER GOAL: This chapter introduces Boozang and how it addresses the pain points of a coded solution as described in the previous chapter. It also presents a possible selection approach for selecting an automation tool, particularly the one I followed before adopting Boozang.

NO OF PAGES : 11

SUB - TOPICS:

1. Proof of Concept phase

2. Pilot phase

3. Why Boozang

4. Codeless approach, how important is it?

Chapter 4: The TCS project

CHAPTER GOAL: This chapter presents the context of the TCS project used all along the book to provide practical examples. I believe that there is no one size fits all solution for software testing and tools. Therefore, clarifying the context is very important to better understand the examples and consider possible adaptations one will have to make for a different context.

NO OF PAGES: 8

SUB - TOPICS:

1. TCS Organization and Test Automation history

2. NIS project introduction

3. Test automation stream, NISTA setup

Chapter 5: How Boozang was born

CHAPTER GOAL: This chapter is a special one about the history behind Boozang. I believe it gives a great idea about this tool's strengths: the two key persons behind it. This input has been kindly provided by Mats Ljunggren.

PART 2: Boozang main concepts and use cases Chapter 6: Starting up with Boozang

CHAPTER GOAL: One of the advantages of a tool like Boozang versus a coded approach is that setting up your first projects is really easy and fast. Nothing to install, no code or POM files to prepare. This chapter will go over the registration process and the few steps needed to create a project. We will also see how to administer your account and projects and finally show how Boozang works behind the scenes.

NO OF PAGES: 22

SUB - TOPICS:

1. Creating your first project

2. The administrative User Interface

3. Boozang under the hood

4. Practice: NISTA setup part 1

Chapter 7: Main concepts and entities

CHAPTER GOAL: This chapter describes the core objects available in Boozang and starts introducing the Integrated Development Environment (IDE).

NO OF PAGES: 38

SUB - TOPICS:

1. Modules and SubModules

2. Application environments

3. Tests and Test Suites

4. Features and Scenarios

5. Searching and bookmarks

6. Recording

7. Generate and reference Test

8. Execution and Reporting

9. Projects settings and UI Customization

10. Updates from the trenches

Chapter 8: Elements location approach

CHAPTER GOAL: This chapter describes Boozang’s unique approach for locating WEB GUI elements, one of the features that sets it apart from other tools. Boozang, with its set of locators based on natural language, allows you to focus on the scenario flow rather than the web page DOM.

NO OF PAGES: 14

SUB - TOPICS:

1. Boozang location strategy

2. Fine tuning the locators

3. Validating the expected results

Chapter 9: Exit conditions, conditional flows, and timers

CHAPTER GOAL: The first test you will try with Boozang will be a simple sequential list of actions. But, as soon as you start implementing real scenarios, you will have to use exit conditions, loops, and conditional flows. In combination with this, you may need to adjust the timing of some locators, as some applications may have slow background processes, heavy loading pages, and/or javascripts. In this chapter, we see how to apply these concepts to build solid and reusable building blocks.

NO OF PAGES: 21

SUB - TOPICS:

1. Exit conditions

2. Conditional flows

3. Loop groups

4. Timers

Chapter 10: Data Management

CHAPTER GOAL: This is probably one of the most important chapters, as data management is one of the main keys to build reusable components. Boozang is extremely powerful and flexible when it comes to managing test data. But power and flexibility can hide a complexity cost if you don’t use it properly.

NO OF PAGES: 13

SUB - TOPICS:

1. Data management concepts

2. Parameters

3. Project data ($project)

4. Module data ($module)

5. Test data ($test)

6. Loops ($loop, $group, $action)

7. Examples from the trenches

Chapter 11: Reporting and troubleshooting

CHAPTER GOAL: This chapter covers some standard and more advanced reporting features available in Boozang as well as the best way you can analyze failures with minimal effort.

NO OF PAGES: 20

SUB - TOPICS:

1. Test reports

2. Trend reports

3. Troubleshooting failures

PART 3: Integrations and Advanced topics

Chapter 12: APIs and mixed API/GUI testing

CHAPTER GOAL: In today’s world applications are highly interconnected, both with internal and external systems. Restful APIs are becoming the de-facto standard to allow this communication. This chapter explains how to test Restful APIs and create scenarios with both GUI and API actions. Boozang allows you to do API testing as well as mix API calls within your GUI tests.

NO OF PAGES: 17

SUB - TOPICS:

1. Restful APIs

2. Why Boozang for testing APIs?

3. API Tests in Boozang

4. Server side mock with JSON Server

5. API Tests from the trenches

Chapter 13: Gherkin and Behavior Driven Development

CHAPTER GOAL: This chapter introduces the reader to the Gherkin language and the practice of Behavior Driven Development (BDD), also known as Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD).

NO OF PAGES: 18

SUB - TOPICS:

1. Behavior Driven Development

2. Gherkin without BDD, pros and cons

3. Gherkin language, readability above all,... if possible

4. Some good and bad examples

Chapter 14: JIRA with Boozang via XRay

CHAPTER GOAL: This chapter shows how to effectively manage releases via JIRA, XRAy and Boozang to have a complete quality view on releases when using both manual and automated tests.

NO OF PAGES: 17

SUB - TOPICS:

1. Using JIRA with XRay

2. Boozang integration with XRay

Chapter 15: Jenkins and the Boozang runner

CHAPTER GOAL: This chapter shows how to use Jenkins for scheduling and reporting automated tests results in a CI/CD pipeline. We will see how Boozang can be used with other tools to provide a fully automated pipeline and also how to reduce the execution time through parallel runs.

NO OF PAGES: 40

SUB - TOPICS:

1. Continuous Delivery and the need for automating acceptance tests

2. Puppeteer and the Boozang runner

3. How to use the Docker runner

4. Keeping execution time low with parallel runs

5. Reports and log files

6. Publishing reports on Jenkins and JIRA

7. Complete working pipeline

8. Docker in Docker setup

Chapter 16: Boozang for teams

CHAPTER GOAL: Working with a team increases productivity but brings new challenges. This chapter covers all the Boozang features for collaborative work, but also some specific details on how to effectively collaborate in a Test Automation project.

NO OF PAGES: 26

SUB - TOPICS:

1. Team collaboration

2. Explicit lock

3. Concurrent development and safe refactoring with branches

4. Tests Map

5. Quality control

Conclusions

Appendix