For a few years Tomasz has developed in Java. He is especially interested in testing and code quality issues, and he is trying to be up to date with all the changes and trends in the testing world. He has a lot of experience with test automation of various applications.

Tomasz works for Software Mind (Cracow, Poland) as a team lead. Right now he is busy with a european research project (full of nice buzzwords - SOA/OSGi/SemanticWeb etc.).

He is test-infected, and he hopes to be very contagious. :) His technical blog devoted to programming and testing can be found at kaczanowscy.pl/tomek.

lecture

Automation of functional tests

The need for exhaustive software testing is well recognised. Even though, our applications are still undertested and full of bugs. There are many reasons for this, including weak automation of tests, which prevents teams from finding bugs quickly enough and lets regression bugs to creep back in. The goal of this talk is to give you enough information about automation of functional tests, that you can start using it for the project you are currently working on. The presentation will concentrate on highly practical information (nevertheless, some theory will be smuggled between the lines).

The presentation will be based on two real-life examples, which will be used to demonstrate the main ideas, techniques and challenges of writing functional tests and automating the execution of such tests. First example will be a typical web-based application (UI: HTML & Ajax), and the second one a OSGi backend application (no real UI, only API). Functional tests for both examples will be executed and analyzed. In both cases crucial elements - like setting the environment or dealing with asynchronous method calls - will be discussed. The examples will also show how cooperation of many small but smart tools can bring a really big value to your project.

The talk will be open for questions during the presentation/demo.