Using Selenium and Cucumber to test a Healthcare Information System

Using Selenium & Cucumber toTest an HIS
Andy Tinkham
Selenium Conference, San Francisco
April 2011

Background Information
Healthland
Web-based HIS (Clinicals, Financials)
Geared to rural hospitals (<50 beds)
.NET-based backend
UI is native HTML/CSS/JavaScript in browser (no Flash or non-standard elements)
Me
16 years of testing experience (almost all automated)
Started using Selenium in 2007

Goals of Current Automation Effort
Run on all our supported platforms & browsers
Rapid deployment in new environment
Keep up with developers
Avoid vendor & script lock-in
Maintain test clarity

Platform & Browser Support
Use Selenium 2
Develop tests on multiple platforms & browsers from start

Rapid deployment
Minimize locations of change from version to version
No hard-coded data in scripts
Robust locators

Keep up with developers
Plan test scenarios as part of feature planning
Minimize change locations
Business-focused tests & code
Use Cucumber so that more people can create tests

Avoid Vendor lock-in
Open source testing tools
Encapsulate tool interface to facilitate swapping in other tools as needed

Avoid Script lock-in
Use random data
Future behavior manager
Future long-scale random test driver

Maintain clarity
Cucumber tests defined in plain text
Tests specify only relevant details
Test specifies verifications that are relevant to the point of the test
Future potential tie-in to test case manager

Architecture

Test Cases
Cucumber features
Created jointly with QA, Dev, BAs, and Product Managers
Created as part of initial story creation
Just enough source code to translate plain text into calls into Conceptual Layer
Specifies only required tasks and data
Random test driver

Example Cucumber test
Feature: Allergy Notification
In order to avoid causing an allergic reaction in a patient while providing treatment
As a patient care provider
I want to be notified of a patient's allergic status
Scenario: No allergy on file
Given I have a patient with no allergy information
When I visit a page with the allergy warning
Then I should see that the patient has no allergy information on file

Conceptual Layer
Provides methods that correspond to actual user tasks and goals
Ignores actual implementation
Gets additional required data not provided by test case

Implementation-Focused Layer
Contains all interactions with actual web pages
Contains all calls to tool interface
Uses Page Objects and Control Objects
Uses ruby modules to handle repeated components bigger than a control

Page Objects
Each page of the application is encapsulated by a single class
The class provides public methods that correspond to the things a user can do on that page
No details of page implementation available outside of class

Control Objects
Each control type is wrapped in its own class
Allows for verification at control level
Removes need to remember how to interact with controls

Support Layer
Contains code that is not specific to any user action
Data classes (Patient, Allergy)
Builders (create new patients, get existing patients)

Challenges so far
Ramp up of staff unfamiliar with tools
Cross-platform database access
Using non-ASCII characters in test data
Firefox/Selenium/FortiClient interaction

Future Directions
Behavior manager
Adding basic performance tests
Basic fuzz testing
Automated usability testing
Tab order
Keyboard navigation
Text rendering
On-site deployment tests
Random test runner/High volume automation
Parallel execution

Questions?
Andy Tinkham
andy.tinkham@healthland.com
andytinkham in IRC #selenium and #ruby.mn channel

Using Selenium and Cucumber to test a Healthcare Information System

by andytinkham on Apr 07, 2011

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Using Selenium and Cucumber to test a Healthcare Information System — Presentation Transcript