Guidelines for Automated Testing

Overview

Continuing the theme of my most recent posts, I’ve decided to start a series on Automated Testing. I’ll be pulling from lessons learned on all of the crazy things that I’ve been involved with over the last year.

It’s a known fact that preemptively writing a table of contents means that you will never get around to finishing a series. Don’t worry, I’ve already written and scheduled each post.

Table of Contents

1. Rapid feedback cycle (Jeremy covered this one)
2. System state
3. Collapsing your application into a single process
4. Defining test inputs
5. Standardizing your UI mechanics
6. Separating test expression from screen drivers
7. Modeling steps for reuse
8. Providing contextual information about failures
9. Dealing with AJAX
10. Utilizing White-box testing for cheaper tests