Software Test Automation in Uncertain Times

(A dystopian sense of humour required)

I hear the science supports this.  Then I hear the science supports that.  I hear these things day after day and, eventually, I conclude the science supports whatever the government wants the science to support.  The truth is therefore whatever you are being told, or is written on the side of a bus, or a promise made but now denied and erased.  It all has a dystopian hallmark as government clumsily attempts to modify and direct unruly human behaviour, on a grand scale, in this direction or that.  

The above was a working bit of script, by the way.  Names have been changed to obscure customers and obfuscate certain semantics and product.  The whole thing builds on a (by now) three year project to upskill and have something a moving skillset compared to the something of a static skillet that had carried me for the better part of twenty years.

Gluing (excuse the pun) Gherkin, to meagre Java and Selenium skills, developed in Paris on the kind business trip I'd like to do more often.  In the French speaking world, my work is more likely to take me to Lomé, Abidjan or Kinshasa.  Far outside of the centre of the City of Light, I needed something to fill my evenings at what turned out to be a bit of a truck stop hotel in a city of very full hotels.  Thank you Roland-Garros, and may you return with a full-on, post pandemic vengeance in 2021! 

Fortunately, on a two week business trip, I had a long weekend,  allowing me to indulge in my other passion.  And what a weekend it was!  

Under lockdown and since, I've had a spare two hours and thirty minutes per day to play with, thanks to commuting no more,  allowing me to develop and refine.  I'd encourage anyone working in tech to do the same.  

Aspects of Gherkin still confuse and bemuse though.  For a simplified version of English, it sometimes seems to attract more dogma than a church.  Some of it I get, as I'm quite used to setting up test cases in an orthodox manner, so in Gherkin I see elements of pre conditions, test conditions, expected outcome and so on, but not as formalised.  Some existing test cases actually transfer quite well.

As for the underlying stuff, it's been an adventure in avoiding code maintainability traps.  Those are tricky buggers, usually caused by me thinking of better ways to do stuff.  Modelling a web page on a given system under test can be faster than writing Gherkin to test it, which is the exact test I had in mind when I started drawing and scribbling, manically, on a sheet of A3, while downing a half decent glass of French red, in the middle of a Paris business park, at a truck stop hotel.

A church, because, see above.

© 2020 Jason Hindle

The photos?  Taken with an Olympus OMD-EM1 mk 2 and 12-40 f2.8.  When Olympus announced they are throwing in the towel, I did consider selling both, for less than a second.  I have cameras that take technically better images, but this is the the most well rounded camera body I've owned.