Testing

Cloudflare Dev Workshop 2020 In mid-February, I had the privilege to attend the first Melbourne Cloudflare dev event. This was just one of a series of sessions they ran across the country to reach out to developers and help educate people around their thinking and the...

04 March, 2020 /

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Disclaimer: this approach won’t be suitable for everybody, please factor in your particular requirements before using it.

The Why

Towards the end of 2018, our client started to move our codebase from AngularJS to Angular 7+ (now 8). While this, in itself, is a great move, it completely broke our A/B testing capabilities. (What's A/B Testing?) Implementing deep changes  to our Angular applications would be much more challenging. The methods we used to amend code on bootstrap of AngularJS applications are no longer available in Angular2+. If you are interested in A/B testing in AngularJS applications, you can read about our previous approach and Adobe setup. While some A/B testing can, and should, be done from the backend, this article will focus on the frontend approach.
07 August, 2019 /

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Gather round disciples, your master is finally ready to reveal the ultimate secrets of the senior developers. Learn how to transform complex, unreadable code into poetry. Or, more accurately, learn what goes through an old developer's head when he's trying to clean up some dodgy code.

26 July, 2019 /

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Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) is an enterprise web content management system that, like many other enterprise applications, is a complex piece of software to set up and configure. We can't eliminate this complexity completely, but we can reduce it for many use-cases. AEM OpenCloud is an open source project being led by Shine Solutions that automates the setup of a complete ready-to-use AEM environment in the cloud within 15 minutes. However, testing and verifying that an AEM installation is working correctly is laborious and time-consuming. Done manually, testing can certainly take longer than the 15 minutes required to actually build the environment in the first place. Fortunately, automated testing was identified early on in the project as an important part of OpenCloud's modular design, as is made clear by this diagram created by Cliff Subagio, one of the project founders: AEM OpenCloud suite However, it's one thing to say that testing is important, it's another thing to actually do it. In this post I'll talk about why and how we used InSpec to implement automated testing in OpenCloud.
31 October, 2018 /

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I was lucky enough to have the opportunity via Shine recently to attend the inaugural OWASP AppSec Day 2018 (Melbourne) at RMIT. Security professionals from around the globe gave some insightful talks into the state of secure application development in 2018. In this post I'll share you some of the key insights I gained from these talks.
29 October, 2018 /

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Introduction

A website may have hundreds, thousands, or even millions, of public facing pages. When we are responsible for maintaining such a website, it's impractical to traverse it manually looking for broken links. We need an automated testing tool: one which can scan the whole website and log any broken links, so we can get them fixed sooner rather than later. In this blog, I am going to describe a web crawler project which can easily and efficiently achieve the goal. The primary technologies used in this project are Scrapy and Docker.
13 September, 2018 /

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I recently had the opportunity to work for a client who wanted to develop what they termed "app indexing". What they meant by this was that they wanted their users to be directed into a specific screen of their iPhone app when they tapped on a particular Google search result. Put differently, they wanted the user to feel as if Google had returned search results specifically for their iPhone app. They also wanted to be able to send out links via email, SMS or other marketing channels. If the app was installed, opening such a link on their phone would result in the user being taken to the relevant points in the iPhone app. If the app wasn't installed then they would just be taken to the mobile website. The way this is achieved is through what Apple refer to as "Universal Links". In this post I'm going to discuss how we implemented Universal Links at a client of ours, some of the obstacles we faced, and how we overcame those obstacles.
15 June, 2017 /

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Bq_tOGxCMAELB4k Back in June 2014, at the annual Google IO in San Francisco, Google unveiled their newest, and much hyped cloud product, Cloud Dataflow. The demo they did that day, using a live twitter feed to analyze supporter sentiment during the 2014 world cup, got my mouth watering at the prospect of working with it. It looked downright freaking awesome, and I just couldn't wait to get my hands on it to take it for a spin.
25 February, 2015 /

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Monkey_Office_1A We recently introduced acceptance test driven development (ATDD) at a client. The idea was for the product owners, developers, and testers to work as a team to come up with the acceptance criteria for user stories before development begins. We adopted this approach as an attempt to increase a shared understanding of user stories, as well as a shared agreement on the definition of 'done'. As we introduced more functionality to the application, it became evident that more and more effort had to be put into regression testing prior to a software release. The application has to be supported on mobile (iOS and Android) and desktop (Safari, Chrome, Firefox, IE8 and above). Our team of 2 to 3 testers would spend up to 3 days testing for regressions! In an attempt to reduce the need for talented testers to carry out monkey work, the team began to push for a focus on automated browser-level testing. In this post I will demonstrate the acceptance testing framework we used and describe how the test suite can be tied to a Jenkins build (with a beautiful results page!).
09 May, 2014 /

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