It’s a simple question, often asked by project managers, data scientists, and quality engineers on every data engineering project when that first data source is ingested. How do we know the data that has been ingested into a data lake is accurate and error-free?
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.
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!).
Unit-testing Backbone Views is hard. You need to cover enough for the test to be meaningful (for example DOM updates and server calls), without getting too tangled up in gory details. In this post I'll talk about how we use QUnit and Sinon.JS to unit-test our Backbone views.
There's already material out there on using these frameworks together, so I'm not going to get into setting things up. However, having done it for a year now I feel I've learnt enough additional tips, tricks and traps to warrant sharing them with the world.
This post will cover the three things you have to think about when testing Backbone Views, then talk about three strategies for simplifying your tests. I'll also share some more general thoughts on Backbone's suitableness for building large apps.
I've worked on a number of projects with Cucumber now, and I think it is a terrific tool. However, I've been seeing it used in ways that it was not originally intended for, the consequence being acceptance-test suites that grow increasingly slow, brittle and difficult to maintain.
These problems occur when developers start using Cucumber to drive overly-detailed tests. The problem of excessive UI testing with Cucumber has been blogged about in the past by Aslak Hellesøy - the creator of Cucumber - but I thought I'd cover some of my own experiences and opinions in this post.