Test automation around emails is pain, if not done properly.

Almost all the user facing web applications require user registration with the email and email usually serves as username in the system – which should be unique.

There are two main problems in automating email functionality –

• Generating unique email addresses
• Accessing inbox and content of the specific emails to check correctness of content and delivery

When I discussed this with evil tester, he pointed me to his blog post on getting disposable email addresses . When I followed the link to lifehacker ,from his blog post, first problem was solved.

It was easy enough to generate a random number such as current time stamp and amend it to any gmail address after adding a plus sign to create new email addresses which will go to the same inbox. So example @ gmail.com, example+123 @ gmail.com and example+321 @ gmail.com are ...

If you are involved in doing any kind of test automation for web application, I am sure you are either using, or have considered Selenium for your test automation efforts. Well, if you have not considered, then maybe it’s time to give it a shot…

For folks who are familiar with or are using Selenium / WebDriver in any form, I hope you are aware that Selenium conference is happening from 16’Th to 18’Th April in London.

Last year, I travelled all the way to San Francisco from London to attend the conference and presented Magic of Modular Test Automation and this year I am presenting One Step At A Time (Will publish slides after the conference). BTW, I also wrote laziest experience report of Selenium Conference 2011 to share my experience … and to summarize my last year's experience in one word - Selenium Conf 2011 was AWESOME ...

Continuous performance Monitoring

Performance testing is an important and integral part of most testing projects. This type of testing corresponds to Q4 of the Agile testing quadrant. You can find interesting insights on the agile testing quadrants in this post by Lisa Crispin.

Usually performance testing teams are different from functional testing teams and their reports / data etc are not easily available to to the entire team. I wanted to have more visibility, integration and feedback about the performance of application - essentially I was looking for Continuous Performance Monitoring.

In this post I will discuss what is continuous performance monitoring and how useful it is to report performance trends for every build.

In my current project, I am using TeamCity as the build server. TeamCity supports custom charts for any data. I thought, It should be possible to have performance data from all the teams in a particular format and ...

This post is a combination of two things - an advise and a request. In case you are wondering, it is not complicated advise and simple request, it's a simple advise and challenging request. If you like challenges of testing web applications, you may like this challenge as well.

So let's talk about the advise first. Find defects to find defects quicker - I am sure most of us already know this, isn't it? But sometime we do need to state and explain obvious. We do it all the time in testing - we state and explain obvious defects isn't it? Well, we need to that because obvious is obviously not obvious for everyone :-)

Software testing is a skilled profession and like all the skilled professions, you get better at it with practice. However, there is a difference between doing day-to-day testing in job for many years and practicing ...

A different post for today. One of my fellow group member @ Open Coffee is looking to hire a QA intern for their social media marketing platform Comufy. If you know some one in London, who will be interested in this opportunity - please get in touch with --------> seb AT comufy DOT com

Please do not contact me for this opportunity - contact Seb instead :-).

Job advert - from the Seb

Have you ever wanted to experience life at one of London's leading startups? Have you ever wanted to work for a young, innovative company, and to be given real responsibilty straight away?

If so, we have the perfect opportunity for you! Comufy are looking for a QA intern to help test and improve their leading social media marketing platform. We're after someone who is ambitious, meticulous and responsible. In return you'll get great hands on experience helping a young company ...

I attended weekend testing America’s session number 18 on Saturday. It was my first WTA session and I must say it was a good learning experience. There was an interesting exercise given by James Bach. The exercise was about Test Charters.

As part of the exercise, we had to critique existing test charters and improve them. I went through the definition of test charter given in the exercise to understand more about test charters. I tried to critique and improve the example charters, based on the definition given in the exercise. I was not satisfied with the outcome and wanted someone to critique my (improved /modified) charters.

My (improved :-)/modified) test charter was discussed during the briefing session and Michael Larsen , Wade, Shrinik and Lalit gave interesting feedback on my charter. During that briefing session, I realised that I can draw analogy of writing test charters to writing user ...

Disclaimer - This post is about the announcement of my pet project - http://www.iCheckWebsite.com

From past few weeks I was focusing on my pet project, iCheckWebsite.com. I was wearing many hats - product owner, scrum master, designer, occasional developer and tester. It was fun and our shiny new version is live now :-) Wearing so many hats was/is difficult and to be honest - it probably means compromising little bit. But hey, it’s okay for self funded start-ups to compromise a little bit. Iterations are not long and hopefully in every new iteration - product will become better and better.

So let me explain what is iCheckWebsite, it’s core idea and how it could be extremely useful for testers working in the web application domain.

iCheckWebsite is an on-demand test automation and content monitoring tool for websites . iCheckWebsite makes it extremely easy to test and monitor content of websites ...

Okay, I admit - I was a bit lazy to write, but hey I had a baby boy in Feb and took time off to play with him and took him to our native place in India. All important stuff right?

Okay so about the conferences - I was in USA for close to three weeks and attended STP Conference in Nashville and WATIR day and Selenium Conference at San Francisco. I started my vacation right after Selenium Conference and I am back again in UK now. I am following LIFO (Last In First Out) to cover Selenium Conference in this post and will cover WATIR day and STP Conference in due course.

Selenium Conference was completely sold out and even for workshop day on Monday - there were little over 300 people in the room. It was a bit of challenge for everyone to follow workshop because of the network related issues ...