Presentations

Productive Grails Functional Testing

We all know we should be writing functional (i.e. web) tests for our Grails applications, but this can sometimes seem like too much work for not enough gain. In this talk we'll look at the current Grails plugins that are out there that can start to decrease the development and maintenance cost and make getting the coverage you need more achievable.

Firstly we'll explore the powerful combination of Geb, the Groovy browser automation library, with Spock, the Enterprise ready testing framework, as the foundation for our testing stack. From there we'll discuss how to manage test data sets using the combination of the grails-fixtures and grails-build-test-data plugins. We'll then see how to use the grails-remote-control plugin to get inside your application from your functional tests to configure and how to use the grails-develop-functional-tests plugin to decrease the cycle time when writing your tests.

Finally, we'll discuss strategies for partitioning tests into logical groups and using the remote execution facilities of Geb to have your functional test suite run against multiple browsers and architectures.

Next Level Spock

So you already know and love Spock, the Enterprise ready testing framework, but want to know how to make the most of it and take your testing to the next level? Then this talk is for you. Even if you're new to Spock, but are interested in making your testing more effective this talk is for you.

We'll start with how the combination of Spock and the Groovy language makes it easy to bring the concept of “executable specifications” to the realm of unit testing, without the ceremony but with all of the benefits, and why this is so important to the health of your system.

From there we'll discuss extending Spock through its own Extension API and support for JUnit rules, which is one way to make your tests much more expressive and maintainable.

We'll close with Spock's seamless integration with Grails 2.0, and some hidden Spock treasures that help you get even more out of your testing.

Geb - Very Groovy Browser Automation

Geb is a browser automation solution for Groovy. It brings together the power of WebDriver, the elegance of jQuery content selection, the robustness of Page Object modelling and the expressiveness of the Groovy language. Geb enables more expressive, more concise, and (very importantly) more maintainable web tests.

In this session we'll explore the foundations of Geb and illustrate how it uses the language features of Groovy to make web automation and testing productive and effective. After exploring the basics we'll explore Geb's rich Content DSL and discuss patterns for achieving maintainable tests. We'll also look at how it combines with Spock, the Enterprise ready testing framework, to enable low cost executable specifications that describe user behaviour, not browser details.