Since the mid ‘90s, test automation has grown from a handful of crude macro-recording tools and custom-built one-off applications to a suite of high-priced, high-powered frameworks. While the frameworks tend to perform as advertised, the pricing typically leaves small software shops out in the cold and mid-size test teams struggling to justify the budget. The framework itself can also have some limitations imposed by the limited flexibility of the scripting language behind it.

In the last few years, the open source movement has produced a series of tools that the enterprising tester can combine into a free framework with all the power and flexibility of full-fledged programming languages. One combination that I’ve used to test various Web-based applications consists of nUnit and WatiN.

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We would like to thank everyone who watched the LDSTech Talk this evening. We are excited to continue the LDSTech Talks and to increase community collaboration.

The entire 2009 LDSTech Talk session will be available for download here as soon as it becomes available.

In the meantime, read about the recipients of the 2009 LDSTech Awards.

We would love to hear what you thought about the event. Submit any feedback to the LDSTech Forum.

The job of a quality assurance engineer is to constantly be looking for ways to improve quality, including setting targets for metrics or setting criteria that must be met before we consider it a quality product.

At a recent gathering of Church quality assurance employees we discussed the idea of how truth affects the quality of our work processes and lives.

We may be really good at setting goals and envisioning the future. However, our ability to achieve those goals depends on having a true understanding of our current state of being — how we’re doing right now. This is the point: often we are not truthful with ourselves about the reality of what our current state actually is. We think (or believe) we know where we are, but in reality we may be far off.

Why is being truthful about our current state so important? An example that was shared by a former mission president was eye-opening. While serving as a mission president, he would regularly look at how the mission could improve in different aspects of missionary work. One area was the knowledge the missionaries had of the discussions and basic gospel doctrines. While he felt that the missionaries were doing well, he believed that there was always room for improvement. He devised a quiz that tested knowledge of basic doctrines, the commitment pattern, and other basic missionary information. It was a simple quiz and he believed that the average scores would be in the 80s and 90s. When the results were tallied, the average score was approximately 30 percent!

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The Roadometer: William Clayton

Technology has grown at an exponential rate since the restoration of the gospel. Every day we are blessed by the contributions of those who are working to advance technology. Many of us think of the computer on our desk when we think of technology. But technology is more than that; it is defined as the practical application of science to commerce or industry.

Latter-day Saints have been active participants in science and technology. Learning about those who have worked so hard to get technology to where it is today can inspire us to keep innovating.  Many of the innovations that we enjoy were either invented or influenced by Latter-day Saints. Mormons in Technology is a short series of articles that will be posted once a month and will discuss some of the technical innovations made by Latter-day Saints since the restoration of the gospel. Use the RSS feed, e-mail subscription, or LDSTech Twitter updates to stay up to date on LDSTech posts.

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There is little question that the Web browser has become the platform for most software applications. The rich Web applications of today push the envelope of Web browser standards (such as HTML, JavaScript, and CSS). Consequently, software developers are finding it necessary to become browser experts. Fortunately, new technologies are being created to help developers bring rich Web apps to market more efficiently. One such technology is the Google Web Toolkit (GWT).

Evolution in Web Application Development

Web development is moving away from the request/response paradigm of older generation applications. In older apps, the application server generated the “View” in the Model-View-Controller pattern. This led to lots of chattiness between client and server, and consequently poorly performing applications and frustrating user experiences. This has been helped with the advent and use of AJAX, which reduces full-page reloading and promotes richer, thicker clients with less control of the View on the server. Many modern Web apps are stateful clients comprised of HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and AJAX calls to a stateless server which performs CRUD (create, read, update, and delete) operations on the database. GWT is a perfect candidate for developing these types of apps.

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Over the years, front-end developers have been called several things to reflect the value that various organizations assigned it, but the most memorable for me is "HTML Monkey." The name reflects the "conventional wisdom" that many organizations have gradually come to accept: that the front-end developer is largely an entry-level position and a career-minded engineer will eventually evolve into either a real designer or a real engineer. This view has led to a production gap that neither real designers nor real engineers want to fill.

For several reasons, though, this cannot continue to be the case for organizations and career-minded engineers who want to compete in the world of the future. Whether through skill set transition or acquisition, the market is demanding the emergence of front-end developers.

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