Yesterday at Huddle we had a very interesting presentation illustrating automated testing techniques available to the engineers for testing the site to make sure it works.

The first of these was the testing tool built in to Visual Studio. By using the web test feature it is a much simplified process to input test values into websites and check that the application is behaving as expected. This can range from anything to seeing if a submitted form returns the expected error message when an incorrect value is entered to ensuring that certain elements are present on a page in a certain state.

This is only so good, however. Visual Studio is unable to cope with situations such as an error message is dynamically made visible (e.g. With Javascript), as this error message exists on the page when there is no error, it is hidden and then made visible when an error occurs. When this situation occurs there is a very useful Firefox addon that can be used, called Selenium. This tool uses simple HTML markup tables to specify the tests (so it can be easily outputted from a program and configured there) and features plugins to enable C# integration (so you can use their classes to test from there) as well as many other things. This provides numerous advantages over the Visual Studio suite but once again has some limitations.

Coupled with tools such as Firebug for Firefox, we rapidly build up a test suite that can be used for one-off tests as well as scheduling advanced tests to drill down through the entire site and test to ensure any updates dont cause unexpected behaviour before release.

Well it’s the end of my first day at Huddle, and it was amazing! All the people were brilliant and I had a huge amount of fun (and substantial challenges too!) sorting out the project I was working on.

I managed to set up a spare box in the office to run a ticker on the big TV in the corner, alternating between different views of the Mingle server showing information on the current iteration of the project. In the end the important information was coming up in very large numbers so everyone could see how they’re doing!

Unfortunately statistics on the Huddle users still aren’t playing ball, mostly due to the fact that stats are very tempremental at the moment! Bohus (who was working on home so I’ve yet to meet him, but was still very helpful on Jabber) said he’d be on it at some point so hopefully we can get some useful numbers coming up on the screen too!

I took some pics on my phone so I’ll get them off when I can and posted for you all to see!

Don’t to keep your eyes on my Facebook page and Twitter and of course here to keep up to date with what’s going on!