A Test Automation Blog

At some point I messed up my local test automation setup and I thought, maybe I should do the experimental things in a Virtual Machine. So here is a compact manual for a Ubuntu VM. For the VM I'm using the open source software VirtualBox from Oracle. There are plenty of manuals for that around on the internet. So I'm not going to cover how to install Virtual box with Ubuntu.  www.virtualbox.org But what I want to cover in this manual is an editor (Visual Studio Code), Ruby, a set of ruby gems (lapis_lazuli, Watir, Selenium-webdriver) and of course the webdriver itself (Geckodriver). So let's get started. Visual Studio Code installation Download the package from https://code.visualstudio.com/ I downloaded the 32bit debian version from https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/?dv=linux32_deb After that I followed the guide on https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/setup/linux sudo apt install ./<file>.deb Ruby + gems installation In the terminal: sudo apt

I think every test automation engineer will come at a point where you need to look at improving/optimizing your test automation script so it will take less time to run. But doing so is always tricky. Your tests should run as reliable as possible, at some point speed also becomes a factor in the equation. So what can you do, what works and which trade-offs should you avoid? Core reason for your TA suite The most important thing to keep in mind is that you should never give in on the core reason why you implemented test automation. If you only have a set of tests that run locally and the results are for you to interpret anyway, speed might be more important and a test is allowed to fail once in a while. But when your test suite is connected to a CI cycle and the results are automatically interpreted, it is very important to have super reliable tests instead. Obviously you want to have fast and reliable tests all the time. But time can only be spend once and is limited in most pr