Preface

From simple websites to complex applications, delivering quality is crucial for achieving customer satisfaction. How to Test a Time Machine provides step-by-step explanations of essential concepts and practical examples to show you how you can leverage your company's test architecture from different standpoints in the development lifecycle.

You'll begin by determining the most effective system for measuring and improving the delivery of quality applications for your company and then learn about the test pyramid as you explore it in an innovative way. You'll also cover other testing topics, including cloud, AI, and VR for testing.

Complete with techniques, patterns, tools, and exercises, this book will help you enhance your understanding of the testing process. Regardless of your current role within development, you can use this book as a guide to learn all about test architecture and automation and become an expert and advocate for quality assurance.

By the end of this book, you'll be able to deliver high quality applications by implementing the best practices and testing methodologies included in the book.

Who this book is for

This practical book is for test owners such as developers, managers, manual QAs, SDETS, team leads, and system engineers that wish to get started on or improve their current QA systems. Test owners looking for inspiration and out-of-the-box solutions for challenging issues will find this book beneficial.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Introduction – Finding Your QA Level, introduces the test architecture, analyzing how different projects can be built and how that can affect the test architecture. It also discusses ways of achieving and improving the test architecture, depending on the stage that a project is at, and identifies the different roles that can participate in quality, their responsibilities, and skills.

Chapter 2, The Secret Passages of the Test Pyramid – the Base of the Pyramid, reviews what type of tools, techniques, and testing are done in the base of the test pyramid, including the differences between coverage and good unit testing and mocking. It also shows a way of automating the base of the pyramid, making these tests easier and more fun to write.

Chapter 3, The Secret Passages of the Test Pyramid – The Middle of the Pyramid, reviews the faces of the middle part of the test pyramid, defining the differences between the backend tests and how they relate to eachother, along with exploring sending APIs, schema validation, sending messages, and shadow and performance testing.

Chapter 4, The Secret Passages of the Test Pyramid – The Top of the Pyramid, covers some of the main tests systems should have, going from the top of the pyramid to the bottom. It suggests some extra tips and projects you can use to improve your quality at the top of the test pyramid.

Chapter 5, Testing Automation Patterns, examines several models for UI automation test code writing to create better-designed frameworks. It visits different models, such as remote topologies, and deals with files with objects and screenshots, and reviews some ways of automating the repetitive parts of test code.

Chapter 6, Continuous Testing – CI/CD and Other DevOps Concepts You Should Know, introduces continuous testing, CI/CD, and other concepts related to DevOps. It discusses different types of continuous testing and tools for CI/CD, and provides a basic continuous testing example.

Chapter 7, Mathematics and Algorithms in Testing, highlights the importance of mathematics in testing, including algorithms that can be specifically useful. It reviews the importance of data science in testing and includes techniques for test case analysis, with an early approach to artificial intelligence (AI).

Chapter 8, Artificial Intelligence is the New Intelligence, discusses the role of AI in testing, including why you should learn it, core concepts, AI for testing, and testing AI applications, with some specific projects and examples to get you started and excited about AI for testing.

Chapter 9, Having Your Head up in the Clouds, explores the cloud, including how it can be useful for testing, how to create tools to measure testing performance, how to test appropriately in the cloud, and its dangers.

Chapter 10, Traveling Across Realities, reviews the different concepts and related applications of XR, including VR and AR, and what particularities they have in terms of quality verification. It includes some tools for XR development and testing in XR and briefly covers the concept of the metaverse.

Chapter 11, How to Test a Time Machine (and Other Hard-to-Test Applications), reviews tips and tricks for testing challenging applications, covering games, difficult applications, non-testing automation, and even what to do with impossible-to-test applications. It starts by discussing how to test a time machine (which gives this book its name) and how this could be extrapolated to any other app and concludes by talking about test architecture.

Chapter 12, Taking Your Testing to the Next Level, offers some tips on how to further your career, find topics that inspire you to reach the next level, and align them to your working and learning styles so that you can build your career plan and, finally, find time to work on it. It includes ways of helping others in your team grow and reasons for doing what you do and caring about quality, alongside the ethics related to testing and how these topics will apply in the future.

To get the most out of this book

While this book is meant to get everyone started in all the discussed topics, having some knowledge of programming is preferable as it will help you get the best out of the practical examples.

On the other hand, if you have computing knowledge, but not so much testing knowledge, you may find some of the examples too easy for you. Feel free to take them to the next level and try out the more challenging aspects of what is discussed here.

Software, programming languages, and libraries covered in the book:

Java, junit-jupiter:5.7.2, Python, unittest, TypeScript, JavaScript, C#, JSON, CSV, RabbitMQ, Cypress, Selenium 4, AirtestProject/Poco, YAML, 3D.js, pandas, Unium, Unity, NumPy, scikit-learn, sklearn, gym, and TestNG.

Additional instructions to set up each of these are provided within each chapter. Make sure you install the mentioned programs and libraries for each chapter.

If you are using the digital version of this book, we advise you to type the code yourself or access the code from the book’s GitHub repository (a link is available in the next section). Doing so will help you avoid any potential errors related to the copying and pasting of code.

Disclaimer

The author is not writing in representation of her company and no content in the book is related to any of her work within her company.

Download the example code files

You can download the example code files for this book from GitHub at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/How-to-Test-a-Time-Machine. If there’s an update to the code, it will be updated in the GitHub repository.

We also have other code bundles from our rich catalog of books and videos available at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/. Check them out!

Download the color images

We also provide a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots and diagrams used in this book. You can download it here: https://packt.link/gFY0Z.

Conventions used

There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.

Code in text: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: “Note that the following files can be located within the Benchmark folder in our GitHub’s repo.”

A block of code is set as follows:

package chapter2;
public class Calculator {
    public int add(int number1, int number2) {
        return number1 + number2;
    }
}

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

java -cp (path to the lib folder where testng is)\lib\*;(path to the bin folder)\bin org.testng.TestNG testngByGroup.xml

Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see onscreen. For instance, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in bold. Here is an example: “We need a system to keep all the code versions together. The place where code is kept is called a code repository.”

Tips or Important Notes

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Get in touch

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