The Way of the Web Tester: A Beginner’s Guide to Automating Tests

This book is for everyone who needs to test the web. As a tester, you’ll automate your tests. As a developer, you’ll build more robust solutions. And as a team, you’ll gain a vocabulary and a means to coordinate how to write and organize automated tests for the web. Follow the testing pyramid and level up your skills in user interface testing, integration testing, and unit testing. Your new skills will free you up to do other, more important things while letting the computer do the one thing it’s really good at: quickly running thousands of repetitive tasks.

This book shows you how to do three things:

How to write really good automated tests for the web.

How to pick and choose the right ones.

* How to explain, coordinate, and share your efforts with others.

If you’re a traditional software tester who has never written an automated test before, this is the perfect book for getting started. Together, we’ll go through everything you’ll need to start writing your own tests.

If you’re a developer, but haven’t thought much about testing, this book will show you how to move fast without breaking stuff. You’ll test RESTful web services and legacy systems, and see how to organize your tests.

And if you’re a team lead, this is the Rosetta Stone you’ve been looking for. This book will help you bridge that testing gap between your developers and your testers by giving your team a model to discuss automated testing, and most importantly, to coordinate their efforts.

The Way of the Web Tester is packed with cartoons, graphics, best practices, war stories, plenty of humor, and hands-on tutorial exercises that will get you doing the right things, the right way.

Table of Contents

Part I Mapping the Pyramid
Chapter 1. The Testing Pyramid
Chapter 2. Smoking User Interface Tests
Chapter 3. Adding UI Tests to Legacy Systems
Chapter 4. Connecting the Dots with Integration Tests
Chapter 5. Integration Testing RESTful Web Services
Chapter 6. Covering Our Bases with Unit Tests
Chapter 7. Unit Testing in the Browser with JavaScript
Chapter 8. Climbing the Pyramid

Part II Exploring the Pyramid
Chapter 9. Programming 101
Chapter 10. Organizing Tests: Bringing Method to the Madness
Chapter 11. Effective Mocking
Chapter 12. Writing Tests First

Appendix A1. CSS Cheat Sheet
AppendixA2. Google Chrome Developer Tools