Google Testing Blog: October 2011

ScriptCover makes Javascript coverage analysis easy

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

By Ekaterina Kamenskaya, Software Engineer in Test, YouTube

Today we introduce the Javascript coverage analysis tool, ScriptCover. It is a Chrome extension that provides line-by-line Javascript code coverage statistics for web pages in real time without any user modifications required. The results are collected both when the page loads and as users interact with it. The tool reports details about total web page coverage and for each external/internal script, as well as annotated code sources with individually highlighted executed lines.

Short report in Chrome extension’s popup, detailing both overall scores and per-script coverage.

Main features:

Report current and previous total Javascript coverage percentages and total number of instrumented code instructions.
Report Javascript coverage per individual instruction for each internal and external script.
Display detailed reports with annotated Javascript source code.
Recalculate coverage statistics while loading the page and on user actions.

Sample of annotated source code from detailed report. First two columns are line number and number of times each instruction has been executed.

Here are the benefits of ScriptCover over other existing tools:

Per instructions coverage for external and internal scripts: The tool formats original external and internal Javascript code from ‘<script>’ tags to ideally place one instruction per line and then calculates and displays Javascript coverage statistics. It is useful even when the code is compressed to one line.

Dynamic: Users can get updated Javascript coverage statistics while the web page is loading and while interacting with the page.

Easy to use: Users with different levels of expertise can install and use the tool to analyse coverage. Additionally, there is no need to write tests, modify the web application’s code, save the inspected web page locally, manually change proxy settings, etc. When the extension is activated in a Chrome browser, users just navigate through web pages and get coverage statistics on the fly.

It’s free and open source!

Want to try it out? Install ScriptCover and let us know what you think.

We envision many potential features and improvements for ScriptCover. If you are passionate about code coverage, read our documentation and participate in discussion group. Your contributions to the project’s design, code base and feature requests are welcome!

4 comments

Google Test Analytics - Now in Open Source

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

By Jim Reardon

The test plan is dead!

Well, hopefully. At a STAR West session this past week, James Whittaker asked a group of test professionals about test plans. His first question: “How many people here write test plans?” About 80 hands shot up instantly, a vast majority of the room. “How many of you get value or refer to them again after a week?” Exactly three people raised their hands.

That’s a lot of time being spent writing documents that are often long-winded, full of paragraphs of details on a project everyone already knows to get abandoned so quickly.

A group of us at Google set about creating a methodology that can replace a test plan -- it needed to be comprehensive, quick, actionable, and have sustained value to a project. In the past few weeks, James has posted a few blogs about this methodology, which we’ve called ACC. It's a tool to break down a software product into its constituent parts, and the method by which we created "10 Minute Test Plans" (that only take 30 minutes!)

Comprehensive
The ACC methodology creates a matrix that describes your project completely; several projects that have used it internally at Google have found coverage areas that were missing in their conventional test plans.

Quick
The ACC methodology is fast; we’ve created ACC breakdowns for complex projects in under half an hour. Far faster than writing a conventional test plan.

Actionable
As part of your ACC breakdown, risk is assessed to the capabilities of your appliciation. Using these values, you get a heat map of your project, showing the areas with the highest risk -- great places to spend some quality time testing.

Sustained Value
We’ve built in some experimental features that bring your ACC test plan to life by importing data signals like bugs and test coverage that quantify the risk across your project.

Today, I'm happy to announce we're open sourcing Test Analytics, a tool built at Google to make generating an ACC simple -- and which brings some experimental ideas we had around the field of risk-based testing that work hand-in-hand with the ACC breakdown.

Defining a project’s ACC model.

Test Analytics has two main parts: first and foremost, it's a step-by-step tool to create an ACC matrix that's faster and much simpler than the Google Spreadsheets we used before the tool existed. It also provides visualizations of the matrix and risks associated with your ACC Capabilities that were difficult or impossible to do in a simple spreadsheet.

A project’s Capabilities grid.

The second part is taking the ACC plan and making it a living, automatic-updating risk matrix. Test Analytics does this by importing quality signals from your project: Bugs, Test Cases, Test Results, and Code Changes. By importing these data, Test Analytics lets you visualize risk that isn't just estimated or guessed, but based on quantitative values. If a Component or Capability in your project has had a lot of code change or many bugs are still open or not verified as working, the risk in that area is higher. Test Results can provide a mitigation to those risks -- if you run tests and import passing results, the risk in an area gets lower as you test.

A project’s risk, calculated as a factor of inherent risk as well as imported quality signals.

This part's still experimental; we're playing around with how we calculate risk based on these signals to best determine risk. However, we wanted to release this functionality early so we can get feedback from the testing community on how well it works for teams so we can iterate and make the tool even more useful. It'd also be great to import even more quality signals: code complexity, static code analysis, code coverage, external user feedback and more are all ideas we've had that could add an even higher level of dynamic data to your test plan.

An overview of test results, bugs, and code changes attributed to a project’s capability. The Capability’s total risk is affected by these factors.

You can check out a live hosted version, browse or check out the code along with documentation, and of course if you have any feedback let us know - there's a Google Group set up for discussion, where we'll be active in responding to questions and sharing our experiences with Test Analytics so far.

Long live the test plan!

19 comments

Google JS Test, now in Open Source

Monday, October 17, 2011

By Aaron Jacobs

Google JS Test is a JavaScript unit testing framework that runs on the V8 JavaScript Engine, the same open source project that is responsible for Google Chrome’s super-fast JS execution speed. Google JS Test is used internally by several Google projects, and we’re pleased to announce that it has been released as an open source project.

Features of Google JS Test include:

Extremely fast startup and execution time, without needing to run a browser.

Clean, readable output in the case of both passing and failing tests.

An optional browser-based test runner that can simply be refreshed whenever JS is changed.

Style and semantics that resemble Google Test for C++.

A built-in mocking framework that requires minimal boilerplate code (e.g. no $tearDown or$verifyAll calls), with style and semantics based on the Google C++ Mocking Framework.

A system of matchers allowing for expressive tests and easy to read failure output, with many built-in matchers and the ability for the user to add their own.

See the Google JS Test project home page for a quick introduction, and the getting started page for a tutorial that will teach you the basics in just a few minutes.

4 comments

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).

16 comments

Unleash the QualityBots

Thursday, October 06, 2011

By Richard Bustamante

Are you a website developer that wants to know if Chrome updates will break your website before they reach the stable release channel? Have you ever wished there was an easy way to compare how your website appears in all channels of Chrome? Now you can!

QualityBots is a new open source tool for web developers created by the Web Testing team at Google. It’s a comparison tool that examines web pages across different Chrome channels using pixel-based DOM analysis. As new versions of Chrome are pushed, QualityBots serves as an early warning system for breakages. Additionally, it helps developers quickly and easily understand how their pages appear across Chrome channels.

QualityBots is built on top of Google AppEngine for the frontend and Amazon EC2 for the backend workers that crawl the web pages. Using QualityBots requires an Amazon EC2 account to run the virtual machines that will crawl public web pages with different versions of Chrome. The tool provides a web frontend where users can log on and request URLs that they want to crawl, see the results from the latest run on a dashboard, and drill down to get detailed information about what elements on the page are causing the trouble.

Developers and testers can use these results to identify sites that need attention due to a high amount of change and to highlight the pages that can be safely ignored when they render identically across Chrome channels. This saves time and the need for tedious compatibility testing of sites when nothing has changed.

We hope that interested website developers will take a deeper look and even join the project at the QualityBots project page. Feedback is more than welcome at qualitybots-discuss@googlegroups.com.

Posted by Ibrahim El Far, Web Testing Technologies Team (Eriel Thomas, Jason Stredwick, Richard Bustamante, and Tejas Shah are the members of the team that delivered this product)

5 comments

Testing Blog

ScriptCover makes Javascript coverage analysis easy

Google Test Analytics - Now in Open Source

Google JS Test, now in Open Source

Take a BITE out of Bugs and Redundant Labor

Unleash the QualityBots

Labels

Archive

Feed