Interviews at The Power of One (1 of 2) from BlueVia on Vimeo.

Jump to ca. 1:45 if you want to see my ugly mug. Unfortunately they didn’t show the main bits when I was talking about QA, and got my name wrong. But it’s all good in the end!

spriteCloud was participating at the Website of the Year Awards 2011, and quite an event it was.

Here you can find the pictures of the event. The winner of the one and only ‘Website of the Year 2011′ Award was Tweakers.net.

Below you will find the results of all the sub categories:

Viral
Wouldn’t this almost be a great viral campaign? This new campaign of one of the world’s leading companies only works properly in Internet Explorer 9.0. In other browsers this is what the Wallmart Video Download service looked like right after launch.

Even though errors like this don’t occur that much anymore most Chrome and Safari users know that there are still quite some annoying bugs when surfing the internet.

The truth is in the numbers
Does this means that developers still can’t be bothered to do cross browser testing? Does it means that companies don’t demand that their web applications work on all browsers? The truth is in the numbers;

Source: StatCounter Global Stats – Browser Market Share

IE 6.0, 7.0, 8.0, 9.0, Firefox 3.6, 4.0, 3.5, 5.0, Chrome 12.0, 8.0, 10.0, Safari 5.0 and so on. What works great in IE 9.0 doesn’t automatically work in IE7. Ok. That shouldn’t be hard to find out.

Source: StatCounter Global Stats – Browser Version Market Share

The top 4 is: Chrome 13, IE 8.0, Firefox 6, IE9. Only thing is, they add up to about 70%.

One hundred percent
In testing 100% is impossible. For cross browser testing this is no different. Let’s say you want to test on the browsers used by at least 85% of all people. This means you’d have to have at least 12 dedicated systems running, and being maintained. Not everyone wants this, which is why we have it. As well as a hosted test environment. We have everything running here in our test lab. Almost everything. From IE x.x, Chrome x, Mozilla, and up

Mobile
When testing mobile web applications you need to be able to test on mobile handsets. We have a wide coverage of handsets for the big mobile operating systems popular today.

Pleased
Having all the handsets; hosted test environments; a test lab based on an official Microsoft Developers Network (MSDN) subscription are just some of the reasons why our customer base, including high profile Digital Agencies, are very pleased with the testing we currently perform for them.

At spriteCloud we are domain experts in AGILE software Quality Assurance and software testing, particularly for web consumer service companies and digital agencies.

More or less by chance I had an opportunity to attend the first day of gamescom this year, Europe’s biggest video game related trade show. The entertainment area where consumers get a glimpse of new games was a blast, as expected. But the business area open only to trade visitors was particularly interesting to me, because there were a fair amount of test companies present.

It seems as if the games industry on the whole takes their testing a lot more seriously than many other sectors of the software world. That shouldn’t be particular surprising, given that games are probably the most abundantly distributed shrink-wrap software still in existence. When you cannot rely on online updates being available to your customers, testing becomes a crucial part of your business — and the stakes are high in video gaming.

Continue reading »

Alright, that’s a provocative title right there, I admit it. I couldn’t resist.

A short while ago, I was perusing the July 2011 issue of the Communications of the ACM, when I came across an interview article with some of the people behind a massive retro-documentation project at Microsoft. Microsoft had to document much of the client-server communications of their existing software to allow third parties to implement interoperable software. The article is succinctly called “Microsoft’s Protocol Documentation Program: Interoperability Testing at Scale”. Definitely worth a read.

The sentence that struck me, and that is repeated in sentiment in the remainder of the article is this: “First and foremost, a team would be required to test documentation, not software, which is the inversion of the normal QA process; (…)”.

I’m not sure I agree with that statement. And to be fair, that statement isn’t the point of the CACM article, either. But it presents a good launch pad for something that concerns me a little.

Continue reading »

It feels like ages that I blogged about the place of QA in software development. Granted, in internet years, it has been a while. But the topic never seems to quite go away.

Since I wrote that other blog post, a lot of things have happened here at spriteCloud. In the meantime, we’ve been involved in the testing process with quite a few more customers (yay!). One thing that emerged over time is that many companies don’t exactly come to us for testing alone, but also for answering the question of how to fit testing into the development and release process.

When you try to answer that question, it quite often happens that you discover that the reason these companies didn’t know how to fit testing into their process is that there is not much of a process in place to fit testing into. To us QA-minded people, that may come as a surprise, but it really shouldn’t be.

As one young developer at one of our clients put it to me (slightly paraphrased): “They should really teach release management in university. Programming is easy enough to pick up, but this stuff is hard to figure out on your own.” I sympathize with that, as it mirrors my own experience from some ten years or so ago when I started out on my development career.

Before you can teach anything about development processes, though, it is essential that one understands the software lifecycle.

Continue reading »

Hi All,

We have seen quite some people having trouble getting a proper test automation setup using cucumber and watir-webdriver or selenium-webdriver. Here we describe the minimum number of steps to get your cucumber with watir/selenium-webdriver up and running.

Step 1 – Install Ruby


Download and install rubyinstaller-1.9.2-p180.exe.


Explanation/details:

rubyinstaller-1.8.7-p334.exe would also work

Step 2 – Extract DevKit


Download and extract DevKit-tdm-32-4.5.1-20101214-1400-sfx.exe to a folder you like.


Explanation/details:

Make sure you create a new folder, it extracts the lib and bin folders to that location, there is no root folder such as DevKit for example.

DevKit is needed because Cucumber requires the json gem. Without installing DevKit you would get the error:
ERROR: Error installing cucumber:
The 'json' native gem requires installed build tools.

Please update your PATH to include build tools or download the DevKit
from 'http://rubyinstaller.org/downloads' and follow the instructions
at 'http://github.com/oneclick/rubyinstaller/wiki/Development-Kit'


Step 3 – Install DevKit

Goto the root folder where you extracted DevKit and execute the commands:

ruby dk.rb init
ruby dk.rb install

Step 4 – Install the required gems

Execute:

gem update --system
gem install rspec --no-ri --no-rdoc
gem install win32console --no-ri --no-rdoc
gem install watir-webdriver --no-ri --no-rdoc
gem install cucumber --no-ri --no-rdoc

Explanation/details:

- Installing rspec because it is a commonly used gem.
- win32console supports colored output on the dos command line when executing the tests!
- watir-webdriver requires selenium webdriver, so that one will be installed always. If you only want selenium-webdriver, just do gem install selenium-webdriver instead.

When creating an install_gems.bat file inlcuding these commands, make sure to use the CALL command, e.g:

CALL gem update --system
CALL gem install rspec --no-ri --no-rdoc
CALL gem install win32console --no-ri --no-rdoc
CALL gem install watir-webdriver --no-ri --no-rdoc
CALL gem install cucumber --no-ri --no-rdoc

Step 5 – Start with your Cucumber and Webdriver setup

New to cucumber? Have a look at our Web Testing With Cucumber blog!

Our pitch about our Website Quality Assurance Services and Solutions in Dutch.

Upon request we have translated the pitch:

Goodday!

Thanks!

On the 12th of January 2011 were the finals of the Shell LiveWIRE Young Business Award 2010 at the Shell headquarters in the Hague. This award is an initiative of Shell and Syntens. As one of the top 20 most innovative starters picked out of a group of >300 innovative young businesses, spriteCloud was able to pitch at the finals of this “Shell LiveWIRE YBA2010″. Here is a screenshot of this pitch made by one of the other nominees:

It was a very well organized event including interviews with the finalists and the CEO of both Shell and Syntens. All the 20 nominees were able to do their pitch at this event. Salution from YESdelft finally won the award. Afterwards there was a dinner organized where everyone was able to talk in more depth about their business. spriteCloud would like to thank the organizers of the event and is thankful that they were able to participate with the Young Business Award 2011.