Pols Consulting

Luke Hohmann has started blogging. Fantastic!

I like this observation:

One of the points that Don made in his presentation was that being a true visionary can, at times, be a curse. When a visionary holds too tightly to his or her vision, they are often overtaken by the world that is happening around them. Furthermore, a visionary can be a bit depressing, as no matter what someone else does, they claim that it is not good enough. And that is simply not true.

Ooooh, this year’s XPDay looks like it’s going to be a good one – it just keeps getting better and better.

Steve Freeman and I are running a session on various techniques for exploring customer requirements. It’s based on our experience in applying some of Dave Snowden’s and Luke Hohmann’s ideas on our recent projects.

A software group is best measured by its customers’ success. Understanding what they really need is critical, but customers are human too which means that they’re fallible. Customers can’t always tell you what they want because sometimes they don’t know themselves, so asking them to rank requirements or write stories might not be the best place to start. This workshop presents techniques for working with customers and other stakeholders to help them understand the context and goals of a project or product. It describes a range of techniques such as “Speedboat”, “Product Box”, “Butterfly Stamping”, and “Give ‘em a jacuzzi” and runs two of them as exercises.

I’ve been running several two week “challenge” assignments recently and really enjoyed them.

This week I’m trying to prove to a company that they can automate lots of their 3rd party vendor acceptance tests. They’re spending vast sums of money on manual testing – any reduction in this would be a godsend.

The first application is a java web app. That should be easy. It turns out that it’s using lots of really strange javascript.

For example, the login form looks like this:

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<form id="login" name="login" method="POST" 
                 action="security_check">
   <input name="username"/>
   <input name="password" type="password"/>
   < !click this to submit! -->
   <a href="#" onclick="submitForm('login',1,{'event':'login'});return false">
      <img src="/some/image/path/login.gif" .../>
   </a>
</form>

The post action “security_check” simply returns an error saying you can’t post! Why would anyone subvert the standard web form process like that? They have some javascript called from an image link that submits the form. If you don’t do things in a standard way you can’t test your application using standard tools.

Httpunit could not parse the javascript. If I clicked the link it simply returned to the same page (due to the href=”#”). JWebUnit uses Httpunit under the hood, so was not really an option (although I did give it a spin). Selenium did not work as I could not change the deployed webapp (the selenium javascript needs to be served up from the same server).

Then I discovered the lovely JExplorer library from MIIK. It basically wraps the IE components so you can embed Internet Explorer in a Swing application.

It worked a treat! I can now automate all my acceptance tests using JExplorer.