Part I: Airport Parking Lot

In this part we will take a look at an online application. Test automation on web pages is one of the things that works quite well through the graphical user interface today. But there are drawbacks to such an approach. However, most teams dealing with online applications will find some hints how to drive their tests in here.

The application to be built is a parking cost calculator for an international airport. There are several parking lots at the airport with different prices for parking durations.

The business rules for the parking cost calculator are complicated enough to make the team fail at the last attempt to build such an online application. Since team members think they got the requirements wrong, they decided to vary their approach this time. The application will be discussed within an Specification Workshop with the customer. Testers, programmers, and customers discuss examples that express the business rules of the parking cost calculator.

In parallel with the programming activities, the tester automates these examples using Cucumber and Ruby in combination with Selenium. At some time he might need help from a programmer on this, but I don’t want to reveal too much in the introduction.

Just in case you are wondering what kind of tool the tester Tony is using to edit the Cucumber examples, of course Tony uses emacs, not vi.