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TeamCity is a java based build management and continuous Integration server from JetBrains. Very often , we will have to extract various metrics from TeamCity for tracking and trend analysis. TeamCity provides versatile api for extracting various metrics which can then be manipulated or interpreted as we need. Below are basic api calls which can be used for extracting mertics. Please note that TeamCity api is powerful enough to do much more than extraction of data. However, for this blog post, I am focussing on metrics extraction part alone. All of these are GET request to TeamCity api with a valid user credentials ( use any id/password which can access TeamCity) ...

What is Accessibility testing ? It is a kind of testing performed to ensure application under test is usable by people with disabilities. One of the most common accessibility testing for web applications is to ensure it is easily usable by people with vision impairment. They normally use screen readers to read the screen and use key board to navigate. Web Content Accessibility Guideline (WCAG) list down guidelines and rules for creating accessible website. There are various browser extensions and developer tools available for scanning web pages to find out obvious accessibility issues. aXe is one of the widely used extension. Details of aXe can be found here. Once browser extension is installed, you can analyze any web page to find out accessibility issues. They also have a javascript API for aXe core . ...

In previous blog post, I have explained about how to create a json response in mountebank. You can read about that here and here. Recently , I had to test a scenario about what will happen to application if downstream API response is delayed for some time . Let us have a look about how we can use mountebank to simulate this scenario. Mountebank supports adding latency to response by adding a behaviour. You can read about that here . Let us try to implement the wait behaviour in one of the previous examples . This is a slight modification of the files used as part of examples mentioned here and here. You can clone my github repo and look at “ExamplesForWaitBehaviour” for the files. ...

I was not active in this blog over past one month due to multiple reasons - both personal and professional. Following are some highlights over past one month. ISTQB Test Automation Engineer As mentioned in previous post, I had a chance to attend ANZTB SIGiST conference in August 2017. There were some good talks about various certifications offered by ISTQB/ANZTB. ISTQB Test Automation Engineer was one among them. I decided to give that a try . Spend some time over past one month to prepare based on the syllabus and I gave it a shot. Fortunately, I passed the exam with good marks ...

An agile retrospective is a meeting held at end of a sprint to analyse their ways of working over past sprint and identify how to become more effective and then adjust accordingly. This is a ritual which belongs to team and criticism is given for facts/output and not for people. Retrospective creates an environment where the team feels safe and comfortable, which will allow them to talk freely about their thoughts and let go their frustration. ...

Today I had a discussion with a project manager about stake holder expectations about value delivered from regression test automation and how to manage stake holder expectation. The discussion soon spanned on to challenges in automating manual test cases and candidates for automation testing. Expectation Vs Reality Management Stakeholders always visualize test automation as a silver bullet for fixing all pain points.They envision automation tests to be quicker, cheaper and effective in identifying all defects. Automation test cases are expected to be run on a button click and with 100% pass rate (except for valid bugs). Needless to say, that expectation is about having complete test coverage for automation scripts. Thinking is always geared towards reducing manual testers based on automation progress rather than having focus on improved quality of final product, faster time to market etc. ...

Today, I had a chance to attend SIGiST conference organised by ANZTB. It was a 2-hour session which includes a presentation, discussion, and networking opportunities. Being a first-time attendee to SIGiST, I was not sure what surprise I may have. Overall it was a fruitful session and I had a chance to meet people from other organisation and to understand what is happening at their end. Today’s presentation was about “Test Automation – What YOU need to know”. Over all, it was a good session even though I found the presentation is more geared towards uplifting manual testers and what steps they should take to stay relevant in today’s world. Going by crowd surrounding presenters after the session, it seems topic was well received and resonated with most of the people in the room. But those who have experience in automation / performance testing will find it basic. The presentation is expected to be uploaded here in few days. ...

One of the common requirement for automated testing is to run same test case against multiple test data. Luckily postman supports this by providing facility to use data files. This is available only when we run through postman collection runner or newman. For this example, let us take a free public API http://services.groupkt.com/country/get/iso2code/AU . This API will return the name of the country depending on the 2 digit code passed. Let us assume that, we need to test this API with multiple country codes. For eg: AU, IN, GB etc. Let us take a look to see how this can be achieved using postman data files. ...

In previous blog, I explained about how to create a GET request, analyze its response, write test cases for API and to save details to a collection for future use. In this blog, let me explain about how to run collections using Newman. What is Newman Newman is a command line collection runner for postman. Newman also has feature parity with Postman and it runs collection in the same way how it is run through Postman. Newman also makes it easier to integrate API test case execution with other systems like Jenkins. ...

Recently one of my colleagues has asked me to train him on using postman and Newman for API testing. Below is a cut down version of training session which I took for him. What is Postman Postman is an Http client for testing web services. It has a friendly GUI for constructing request and analyzing the response. There is a command line tool called Newman for running the postman collections from command line. This will help to integrate postman to other testing tools. ...