On 22nd September 2014 we held a webinar to discuss the testing that the Black Ops Testing Team had performed on Taskwarrior.
Taskwarrior is a CLI application for managing tasks and todo lists. You can find out more on the web site.
We chose Taskwarrior because it has an outwardly simple appearance and interface, but hides a lot of complex functionality. We knew that we would have our work cut out because:
- a lot of functionality
- we would all have to refresh our memory of testing CLI apps
When you watch the video you’ll see we approached the subject in a variety of ways:
- James experimented with an EC2 instance as a test environment with a restricted terminal interface, and a local install
- James used the existing defect reports to guide his testing
- Steve tested through the EC2 restricted interface and concentrated on functionality
- Alan and Tony installed locally on Ubuntu environments, Alan’s was virtual, Tony’s was a local install. This meant they were a version behind James and Steve
- James used textmate to help him monitor the changing files
- Alan used multitail to view the changing files, and this helped direct his testing deeper into the basic ‘modify’ functionality. Alan used the out the box gedit to view the files
- James described excel to create data and using source to load the data as a series of commands.
- Alan did initial research so the he could control his environment and backup his data as he went, also using the history command to provide an alternative way of tracking his test execution. Also mentioning Terminator with its logging plugin to record test execution automatically.
Resources
- You can find Alan’s notes on github, as a set of history extracts, zip files of Taskwarrior data and an 18 page pdf of his exploratory testing notes.