Exploratory Tooling

Last week I started a new job. The team I've joined owns a back-end service and, along with all the usual onboarding process, inevitable IT hassles, and necessary context-gathering, one of my goals for my first week was to get a local instance of it running and explore the API.

Which I did.

Getting the service running was mostly about ensuring the right tools and dependencies were available on my machine. Fortunately the team has wiki checklists for that stuff, and my colleagues were extremely helpful when something was missing, out of date, or needed an extra configuration tweak.

Starting to explore the service was boosted by having ReDoc for the endpoints and a Postman collection of example requests against them. I was able to send requests, inspect responses, compare both to the doc, and then make adjustments to see what effects they had.

If that's testing of any kind, it's probably what I call pathetic testing:

There's this mental image I sometimes have: I'm exploring the product by running my fingers over it gently. Just the lightest of touches. Nothing that should cause any stress. In fact, I might hardly be using it for any real work at all. It's not testing yet really; not even sympathetic testing although you might call it pathetic testing because of itself it's unlikely to find issues.

One of the functions offered by the service is a low-latency search endpoint which enables autocompletion on the client side. You know the kind of thing; as the user types, suggestions appear for them to choose from.

The doc for this is fine at a high level. I was interested to understand the behaviour at a lower level but found Postman (with my level of expertise) required too many actions between requests and made comparison across requests difficult. The feedback loop was too long for me.

So I wrote a tool. And if that sounds impressive don't be fooled: I was standing on the shoulders of giants.

What does my tool do? It's a shell script that runs curl to search for a term with a set of parameters, pipes the response through jq to parse the hits out of the JSON payload, and then uses sed to remove quoting. Here's the bare bones of it:

#!/bin/zsh

p1=$1
p2=$2
term=$3

URL='http://localhost/search?query='$term'&p1='$p1'&p2='$p2

curl --location $URL | jq '.results | @csv' | sed 's/[\"\\]//g'

A series of runs might look like this, if I'm exploring consistency of results as I vary the search term starting with "te":

$ search x y te
team,term,test,teams,terms,tests

$ search x y ter
term,terms

$ search x y term
term,terms

$ search x y terms
terms

$ search x y termst

$ search x y terms
terms

$ search x y term
term,terms

Or perhaps like this if I'm exploring the parameters:

$ search x y test
test,tested,testing

$ search A y test
test,Test,tested,Tested,testing,Testing

$ search A B test
test,Test,tested

There is nothing clever going on here technically but I get a major benefit practically: I have abstracted away everything that I don't need so that my next test can be composed and run with minimal friction. I can quickly cycle through variations and compare this and previous experiments easily. Feedback loop tightened.

Actually, when I said "I have abstracted away everything that I don't need" what I really meant was "I have a very specific mission here, which is to look at how search terms and parameters affect search results. Because I'm on that mission, I choose not to view all of the other data returned by the server on each of my requests. I may miss something interesting by doing that but I accept the trade-off".

That aside, there are numerous things that I could do with this tool now that I have it. For example:

Write a script with a list of search terms in it and call each of them in turn, collect the results and write them to a file that I could analyse in, say, Excel.
Point it at a production server as well, and compare my test environment to production in every call.
Launch hundreds of these searches at the same time from another script as a simple-minded stress test.

Or I could just throw it away because it has served its purpose: facilitating familiarisation with a feature of our service at low cost and high speed, initiating source code inspection and conversations, and along the way helping me to find a few inconsistencies that I can feed back to the team.
Image: https://flic.kr/p/8pCp4W
Highlighting: https://pinetools.com/syntax-highlighter

Comments

Chris Kenst said…

Love this example and use of a test tool. Fits a specific mission, helps you it’s purpose and then you move on.

March 29, 2021 at 12:04 AM

Danny Dainton said…

Nice example! I would have had it running in Postman no probs ;)

March 29, 2021 at 12:00 PM

Meet Me Halfway?

The Association for Software Testing is crowd-sourcing a book, Navigating the World as a Context-Driven Tester , which aims to provide responses to common questions and statements about testing from a context-driven perspective . It's being edited by Lee Hawkins who is posing questions on Twitter , LinkedIn , Mastodon , Slack , and the AST mailing list and then collating the replies, focusing on practice over theory. I've decided to contribute by answering briefly, and without a lot of editing or crafting, by imagining that I'm speaking to someone in software development who's acting in good faith, cares about their work and mine, but doesn't have much visibility of what testing can be. Perhaps you'd like to join me? --00-- "Stop answering my questions with questions." Sure, I can do that. In return, please stop asking me questions so open to interpretation that any answer would be almost meaningless and certa

Can Code, Can't Code, Is Useful

The Association for Software Testing is crowd-sourcing a book, Navigating the World as a Context-Driven Tester , which aims to provide responses to common questions and statements about testing from a context-driven perspective . It's being edited by Lee Hawkins who is posing questions on Twitter , LinkedIn , Mastodon , Slack , and the AST mailing list and then collating the replies, focusing on practice over theory. I've decided to contribute by answering briefly, and without a lot of editing or crafting, by imagining that I'm speaking to someone in software development who's acting in good faith, cares about their work and mine, but doesn't have much visibility of what testing can be. Perhaps you'd like to join me? --00-- "If testers can’t code, they’re of no use to us" My first reaction is to wonder what you expect from your testers. I am immediately interested in your working context and the way

The Best Programmer Dan Knows

I was pairing with my friend Vernon at work last week, on a tool I've been developing. He was smiling broadly as I talked him through what I'd done because we've been here before. The tool facilitates a task that's time-consuming, inefficient, error-prone, tiresome, and important to get right. Vern knows that those kinds of factors trigger me to change or build something, and that's why he was struggling not to laugh out loud. He held himself together and asked a bunch of sensible questions about the need, the desired outcome, and the approach I'd taken. Then he mentioned a talk by Daniel Terhorst-North, called The Best Programmer I Know, and said that much of it paralleled what he sees me doing. It was my turn to laugh then, because I am not a good programmer, and I thought he knew that already. What I do accept, though, is that I am focussed on the value that programs can give, and getting some of that value as early as possible. He sent me a link to the ta

Beginning Sketchnoting

In September 2017 I attended Ian Johnson 's visual note-taking workshop at DDD East Anglia . For the rest of the day I made sketchnotes, including during Karo Stoltzenburg 's talk on exploratory testing for developers (sketch below), and since then I've been doing it on a regular basis. Karo recently asked whether I'd do a Team Eating (the Linguamatics brown bag lunch thing) on sketchnoting. I did, and this post captures some of what I said. Beginning sketchnoting, then. There's two sides to that: I still regard myself as a beginner at it, and today I'll give you some encouragement and some tips based on my experience, to begin sketchnoting for yourselves. I spend an enormous amount of time in situations where I find it helpful to take notes: testing, talking to colleagues about a problem, reading, 1-1 meetings, project meetings, workshops, conferences, and, and, and, and I could go on. I've long been interested in the approaches I've evol

Not Strictly for the Birds

One of my chores takes me outside early in the morning and, if I time it right, I get to hear a charming chorus of birdsong from the trees in the gardens down our road, a relaxing layered soundscape of tuneful calls, chatter, and chirrupping. Interestingly, although I can tell from the number and variety of trills that there must be a large number of birds around, they are tricky to spot. I have found that by staring loosely at something, such as the silhouette of a tree's crown against the slowly brightening sky, I see more birds out of the corner of my eye than if I scan to look for them. The reason seems to be that my peripheral vision picks up movement against the wider background that direct inspection can miss. An optometrist I am not, but I do find myself staring at data a great deal, seeking relationships, patterns, or gaps. I idly wondered whether, if I filled my visual field with data, I might be able to exploit my peripheral vision in that quest. I have a wide monito

ChatGPTesters

The Association for Software Testing is crowd-sourcing a book, Navigating the World as a Context-Driven Tester , which aims to provide responses to common questions and statements about testing from a context-driven perspective . It's being edited by Lee Hawkins who is posing questions on Twitter , LinkedIn , Mastodon , Slack , and the AST mailing list and then collating the replies, focusing on practice over theory. I've decided to contribute by answering briefly, and without a lot of editing or crafting, by imagining that I'm speaking to someone in software development who's acting in good faith, cares about their work and mine, but doesn't have much visibility of what testing can be. Perhaps you'd like to join me? --00-- "Why don’t we replace the testers with AI?" We have a good relationship so I feel safe telling you that my instinctive reaction, as a member of the Tester's Union, is to ask why we don&

Postman Curlections

My team has been building a new service over the last few months. Until recently all the data it needs has been ingested at startup and our focus has been on the logic that processes the data, architecture, and infrastructure. This week we introduced a couple of new endpoints that enable the creation (through an HTTP POST) and update (PUT) of the fundamental data type (we call it a definition ) that the service operates on. I picked up the task of smoke testing the first implementations. I started out by asking the system under test to show me what it can do by using Postman to submit requests and inspecting the results. It was the kinds of things you'd imagine, including: submit some definitions (of various structure, size, intent, name, identifiers, etc) resubmit the same definitions (identical, sharing keys, with variations, etc) retrieve the submitted definitions (using whatever endpoints exist to show some view of them) compare definitions I submitted fro

Vanilla Flavour Testing

I have been pairing with a new developer colleague recently. In our last session he asked me "is this normal testing?" saying that he'd never seen anything like it anywhere else that he'd worked. We finished the task we were on and then chatted about his question for a few minutes. This is a short summary of what I said. I would describe myself as context-driven . I don't take the same approach to testing every time, except in a meta way. I try to understand the important questions, who they are important to, and what the constraints on the work are. With that knowledge I look for productive, pragmatic, ways to explore whatever we're looking at to uncover valuable information or find a way to move on. I write test notes as I work in a format that I have found to be useful to me, colleagues, and stakeholders. For me, the notes should clearly state the mission and give a tl;dr summary of the findings and I like them to be public while I'm working not just w

Make, Fix, and Test

A few weeks ago, in A Good Tester is All Over the Place , Joep Schuurkes described a model of testing work based on three axes: do testing yourself or support testing by others be embedded in a team or be part of a separate team do your job or improve the system It resonated with me and the other testers I shared it with at work, and it resurfaced in my mind while I was reflecting on some of the tasks I've picked up recently and what they have involved, at least in the way I've chosen to address them. Here's three examples: Documentation Generation We have an internal tool that generates documentation in Confluence by extracting and combining images and text from a handful of sources. Although useful, it ran very slowly or not at all so one of the developers performed major surgery on it. Up to that point, I had never taken much interest in the tool and I could have safely ignored this piece of work too because it would have been tested by

Build Quality

The Association for Software Testing is crowd-sourcing a book, Navigating the World as a Context-Driven Tester , which aims to provide responses to common questions and statements about testing from a context-driven perspective . It's being edited by Lee Hawkins who is posing questions on Twitter , LinkedIn , Mastodon , Slack , and the AST mailing list and then collating the replies, focusing on practice over theory. I've decided to contribute by answering briefly, and without a lot of editing or crafting, by imagining that I'm speaking to someone in software development who's acting in good faith, cares about their work and mine, but doesn't have much visibility of what testing can be. Perhaps you'd like to join me? --00-- "When the build is green, the product is of sufficient quality to release" An interesting take, and one I wouldn't agree with in general. That surprises you? Well, ho

Hiccupps

Search This Blog