Posted on   |   In   |  

How to configure Travis CI for iOS testing

A practical guide on how to configure Travis CI to run iOS, and OS X, tests.

Running Xcode tests from the terminal

In this post we take a look at how to run Xcode tests suites from the terminal with xcodbuild and xcpretty, and why you should do it

raywenderlich/swift-algorithm-club: Algorithms and data structures in Swift, with explanations!

swift-algorithm-club - Algorithms and data structures in Swift, with explanations!
Very good resource if you just got started with swift. Even if you are an experinced iOS/macOS developer, it is always good to come back to the basics.

Git Interactive Rebase, Squash, Amend and Other Ways of Rewriting History

Learn the git tools that will allow you to keep a clean git history, how to use them, and why they should be handled with care.
Ways to rewrite the history with git.

ios - Swift extract regex matches - Stack Overflow

Good Q&A about swift regex matching.

fonts - How do I make an attributed string using Swift? - Stack Overflow

Best explaination about attributed string in swift.

Posted on   |   In   |  

obqo - Testing Of Enumerations Made Easy

Well written article just sovled my problem right on spot.

Writing a lexer in Swift

Step one, write a Lexer in swift.

futurice/ios-good-practices: Good ideas for iOS development, by Futurice developers.

ios-good-practices - Good ideas for iOS development, by Futurice developers.
Could be very useful for future references.

Creating your first iOS Framework

Learn to build your own iOS framework that’s compatible with Carthage, CocoaPods and git submodules. The best starting point to get started with swift framework.
Very good starting point for swift beginers like me.

Posted on   |   In   |  

Swift is getting there. The language is maturing by day. The community is incredible. With version 3 coming, I think it is time to dip my toes in it.

1 The Experience

The language feels extremely elegant in my opinion. I agree most of the decisions made by the designer of the language. Which makes it very easy for me to learn. Took me an hour to get the big picture through Getting Started with Swift - WWDC 2016, which by the way, is a good starting point for anyone with background of other programming languages. And roughly another hour to play with it in Xcode. Then I started to write real code.

2 Dependency Manager

A good dependency management system is essential for any project. After digging around, I found that cocoapods is the established solution for that. However, I found Carthage/Carthage is the new black now. Also personally I like Carthage's design philosophy better. I followed Creating your first iOS Framework from thoughtbot to setup my own framework project.

Posted on   |   In   |  

Alex Obenauer

Alex Obenauer, founder of Mindsense (the company who created the awesome mail app Mail Pilot). Let’s see what he is saying about product desgin.

(4) Software Testing: What are the most effective interview questions/techniques to evaluate a QA engineer/tester? - Quora

The top voted answer for this question is a good definition of modern QA. Oh, actually, IMHO, it is the definition of a good Developer as well. Wait, there used to be only software developer back in the days. It seems to circle back again.

I am surprised to see that there are still IT companies who still take QA lightly. They hire QAs just to check the boxes. Which is baffling to me. They’d rather spending money to hire people who can barely read code in order to check the boxes, but not to hire a couple of real QAs to really raise the quality of the product. Are you running some kind of charity? If you don’t have the budget for good QAs, let the developers do it. If they think it’s a shame to do QA job instead of writing real code, kill them. Sorry, I mean fire them. Simple as that.

Posted on   |   In   |  

1 General Principle

One most important principle of writing spec is to be specific. For API test specifically, your testing target is the API (RESTFul, SOAP…). Yes, the general guild line is not to expose technical details in spec definition. However, the target you are testing is very technical itself. The consumer of your specs should be other technical people, most likely a group of developers. So yes, please do expose that kind of detail.

2 Examples

This is a comparison of two examples.

2.1 A Bad Example

Given I am a user who have the ability to login successfully
When I login
Then I should be logged in successfully

The above spec definition gave me zero information, and I don't trust the underlay implementation of any of the sentences.

One big misunderstanding is that the purpose of spec in any cucumber framework is not only for driving the tests, but also act as documentation for human to read. In this case (API spec), it's for developers who consume the API. The developer who read this spec cannot get any descriptive information about the API.

2.2 A Good Example

Given I am user "testuser1"
When I do "POST" on "/api/login"
Then I expect to get http status code 200
And The JSON at "message" should be "success"

3 Benefits from the above definition:

  • It provides detailed information about how the API should work, and what to expect for response (detailed JSON structure and value)
  • Highly reusable code. All of the sentences are very generic, and can be easily implemented for all scenarios.
  • Be confident that the tests will do the check for you. Then I expect to be logged in successfully does not guarantee anything.

3 Create DSL of your own

Gherkin language is a DSL (Domain Specific Language) designed to describe acceptance criterial. It is very general and feature rich. With it's rich feature set you can use it any way you want. But

With great power comes great complexity.

In order to use it efficiently, you need to set the rules. You need to explain to your BAs/QAs that they can write And I expect to get http status code 200, but And I pleasantly expect to get http status code 200 is wrong. Unless you want to build a natural language recognition engine to back that up.

In our case specifically, here is the current state of the ever evolving syntax we use.

3.1 response evaluation

I start with response evaluation since it is easy to implement. 

And I expect to get http status code <http status code>
And the JSON at "<path>" should be "<value>"
And the JSON at "<path>" should be of type "<type>"
And the JSON should have "<attribute/path>"
And The JSON at "<path>" should have "<attribute>"

# multiline example
And the JSON should have the following:
| name | Type | value |
| <name> | <type> | <value> |

And the JSON at "<path>" should have the following:
| name | Type | value |
| <name> | <type> | <value |

Format of the path: . separated, [] for index of array. example:

And the JSON at accounts[0].name should be "Checking"

3.2 sending request

The request is not easy to generalise due to following reasons:

  • Its hard to describe POST request with complicated body without putting the JSON data directly into spec definition.
  • The content of post data sometimes depend on previous conditions or the response of previous API calls.

However, it should not stop us from leveraging the benefit of DSL as much as possible. So: 

And I do "<verb>" on "<endpoint>"
And I create "<verb>" request on "<endpoint>"
And I set the JSON request body at "<path>" to "<value>"
And I set the request body to JSON
"""
<the whole JSON here>
"""

# send the request with custom build body
And I send it

The compromise has to be made when the request body content is depending on the external conditions (e.g. responses from previous calls). Then we have specific bindings for those kind of requests. For example: 

When I do "GET" on "/api/profile"
Then the JSON should have the following
"""
{
  "status": "offline",
  "username": "xxx",
  ...
}
"""

# this will send a 'POST' request with modified version of the JSON content 
# from the last call
When I update my profile "status" to "active"
Then I expect to get http status code 200

4 Future Work

  • Design appropriate syntax for describing complicated situation. Remove the compromises.

Posted on   |   In   |  

Learn how to write apps for the iPhone using Swift 3 - How to - Macworld UK

Need to learn Apple’s Swift development language? Help is at hand with these handy online resources, including free & paid for courses.

Carthage Tutorial: Getting Started

In this Carthage tutorial, you’ll learn all about what Carthage is, how to install it, and how to declare, install, and integrate your dependencies.

mooz deceives you

Interesting blog, interesting projects and intersting person. I found him from his javascript org-mode parser project.

Posted on   |   In   |  

Better local require() paths for Node.js

Very detailed explaination around the “require” issue in node.js. No perfect solution. That’s the way it is.

Linux Lighting Group - JUnit XML reporting file format

I need to parse result files from different UT framework. JUnit is a tough one because there’s no clear spec for it. This is the best I can find so far.

JUnit Format - Enterprise Tester

A blog post about JUnit test result format.