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Next Week: Automating Amazon : How I Am Spending My Christmas Vacation

December 17, 2015 , , , ,

Automating Amazon: How I Am Spending My Christmas Vacation: 


For the past few years, I have been coming up with little side projects during my Christmas break to help deepen my knowledge of the software testing industry.

  • December 2012: Examining the book How Google Tests Software
  • December 2013: Taking Alan Richardson's excellent online course Selenium 2 WebDriver with Java
  • December 2014: I was quite busy! I retook Alan Richardson's course, spent time creating this blog, and I finally created a GitHub account storing Java and Python code samples I could show to prospective employers as I interviewed for automation development positions. Quite handy when I was caught up in a surprise layoff and was searching for automation positions this time last year.
This Christmas, I was going to carry on the tradition!



Starting next week, there will be new blog entries posted to Adventures in Automation every Tuesday and Thursday for the next couple of weeks.

I will be attempting to develop automated tests for the Amazon.com site using the knowledge I have gained since I joined Fitbit-Boston in March 2015.

I will be:

  • Blogging my thought process as I attempt to automate Amazon.com
  • Talking about setting up various automation development environments and the tools used to test.
  • Modeling the automated tests on how we are currently designing automated tests for the Fitbit.com shopping cart. 
  • Sharing my sourcecode on GitHub.com

Concepts we will be talking about:

  • Using TestNG to create tests
  • Page Objects to organize the methods on how to interact with the elements on the particular page
  • Wrappers for commonly used Selenium WebDriver functions
  • Actions classes grouping up commonly used methods, so tests are easier to create
  • Plain Ole Java Objects (pojos) to gather up and group together parameters of test objects, so we can pass one object into a method, instead of five or six parameters. 

Please note: I haven't been doing automation on-the-job for very long. I have less than a year's worth of experience developing automated tests in Selenium WebDriver. Although I can describe how we do things at Fitbit, please don't take anything that I am doing as the industry standard. 

If you do have knowledge of the industry standard of automated testing, please feel free to correct me! I will be eagerly monitoring the comments section for any advice or wisdom. 

And no, I don't actually know how Amazon develops their automated tests. I will only be taking my best shot at it.

I'm looking forward to it! 

Update 1/7/2016:

NEXT: Setup of a Development Environment >>

-T.J. Maher
 Sr. QA Engineer, Fitbit-Boston

// Manual tester, 15 years
 // Automated tester for [ 8 ] months and counting

Please note: 'Adventures in Automation' is a personal blog about automated testing. It is not an official blog of Fitbit.com.