CATEGORIES

• Marathon (5)
• JRuby (1)

BOOKMARKS

• Development Blog

This post is about two features that are yet to be released for Marathon. We are working on these features and hope to release soon. I am publishing these details in the hope of getting feedback.

Checklists

Checklists are everywhere. The GTD crowd lives by them. A checklist is a tool in testers arsenal when used well makes mundane tasks easy to handle, complex tasks more structured and overall provides systematic way of handling testing.

Marathon Checklists

Marathon brings the goodness of checklists to the automation - making it possible to create semi automatic test scripts.
Marathon checklist is a form containing either checkbox items (along with an explanatory text area) or plain text areas. The forms are stored as plain XML files. These can be created through an (rudimentary) UI while recording or using you favorite text editor.
While recording a test script, you can insert a checklist action. You will be prompted with the existing forms and you can either select a predefined form or create a new one.
While playing a test script with a checklist action, the user will be presented with the form. The form will have options to succeed or fail the test script. In both the cases, the results are written into a XML file. At the end of test run, you can create a checklist report that formats the results and display either in text or html format.
The checklist actions by default are ignored during batch run (from commandline or JUnit view). You can enable the checklist actions by passing a command line parameter (for batch run) or a menu option (for JUnit run).

Exploratory Testing With Marathon

Having the checklists is good and we can make it better by adding an exploratory test mode. The exploratory test mode is similar to recording mode (may be the same option) - where the application is started and the script is recorded. But the recorded script is not used for playback. It is used to provide the step by step operations for reproducing a bug. During this mode, you have an option of adding a test failure. When using this option, you can either provide free form text or use an existing checklist. Marathon will store the results including the recorded part of the script in a XML file. A report option provides the Text or HTML view of the results.
Another feature of exploratory testing mode - for a later release - is the ability to add a window screen shot and making annotation markings on the screenshot image. This screenshot will also be added to the results.

How does these features sound? Do you think these will be useful? Please leave feedback in the comments.

Posted in Marathon

« JRuby: Passing array of array of string to java

Using Marathon for laying out a form »

(C) Jalian Systems 2008 | contact