googletesting: Take a BITE out of Bugs and Redundant Labor

Take a BITE out of Bugs and Redundant Labor

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

In a time when more and more of the web is becoming streamlined, the process of filing bugs for websites remains tedious and manual. Find an issue. Switch to your bug system window. Fill out boilerplate descriptions of the problem. Switch back to the browser, take a screenshot, attach it to the issue. Type some more descriptions. The whole process is one of context switching; from the tools used to file the bug, to gather information about it, to highlight problematic areas, most of your focus as the tester is pulled away from the very application you’re trying to test.

The Browser Integrated Testing Environment, or BITE, is an open source Chrome Extension which aims to fix the manual web testing experience. To use the extension, it must be linked to a server providing information about bugs and tests in your system. BITE then provides the ability to file bugs from the context of a website, using relevant templates.

When filing a bug, BITE automatically grabs screenshots, links, and problematic UI elements and attaches them to the bug. This gives developers charged with investigating and/or fixing the bug a wealth of information to help them determine root causes and factors in the behavior.

When it comes to reproducing a bug, testers will often labor to remember and accurately record the exact steps taken. With BITE, however, every action the tester takes on the page is recorded in JavaScript, and can be played back later. This enables engineers to quickly determine if the steps of a bug repro in a specific environment, or whether a code change has resolved the issue.

Also included in BITE is a Record/Playback console to automate user actions in a manual test. Like the BITE recording experience, the RPF console will automatically author javascript that can be used to replay your actions at a later date. And BITE’s record and playback mechanism is fault tolerant; UI automation tests will fail from time to time, and when they do, it tends to be for test issues, rather than product issues. To that end, when a BITE playback fails, the tester can fix their recording in real-time, just by repeating the action on the page. There’s no need to touch code, or report a failing test; if your script can’t find a button to click on, just click on it again, and the script will be fixed! For those times when you do have to touch the code, we’ve used the Ace (http://ace.ajax.org/) as an inline editor, so you can make changes to your javascript in real-time.

Check out the BITE project page at http://code.google.com/p/bite-project. Feedback is welcome at bite-feedback@google.com. Posted by Joe Allan Muharsky from the Web Testing Technologies Team (Jason Stredwick, Julie Ralph, Po Hu and Richard Bustamante are the members of the team that delivered the product).

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Take a BITE out of Bugs and Redundant Labor

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