Luke Daley

Automated web application testing with Gradle and Selenium

1:30 PM MDT

Doing full stack testing (sometimes referred to as “functional” or “acceptance” testing) of web applications is a non trivial business. While such tests are undisputedly more costly to develop, maintain and execute than simple unit tests, that's no excuse to ignore this crucial aspect of a comprehensive testing strategy. Many teams still rely on expensive manual testing for coverage at this level, citing the difficulty in managing a large body of automated functional tests. In this session we'll look at how Gradle can help by orchestrating the necessary components of a Selenium 2 based toolchain.

We'll look at how Gradle's flexibility and extensibility can be used to; provision browsers to be used for testing, parameterizing test execution, grouping tests, executing tests across different browsers, parallelizing test execution in different ways and merging test results. We'll implement a focussed build framework for developing, executing and maintaining automated web tests using Java, Selenium, TestNG and using Jenkins to run our tests for us. Automated web tests have a high cost but an extremely high value, as they can give you confidence that your software actually works when fully assembled. We'll see how Gradle can reduce the cost aspect of this equation without sacrificing on the value.

Finally, we'll briefly look at using some more progressive tooling by using Geb in place of Selenium and the Spock Framework in place of TestNG. The Geb and Spock Framework tools are both side projects of Gradleware core engineers.

Geb - Very Groovy Browser Automation

3:15 PM MDT

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.

Implementing a Standardized Build Platform Across the Enterprise with Gradle

5:00 PM MDT

The larger and more diverse your technology organization, the greater the value you can realize in standardizing your build and delivery process. Internal build standards make it easier for people to switch between teams, allowing you to more readily adjust your staffing to meet changing business needs. In this session we’ll walk through examples of leveraging Gradle’s extensibility and plugin mechanisms to develop standards, enforce compliance and deliver tailored out of the box functionality. We will also look at how to provision such customisations throughout your enterprise in a controllable way.

Gradle's flexibility combined with its support for conventions, including your conventions, provides the ability to solve your automation challenges effectively in a centralised fashion.

Gradle - the Innovation continues

9:00 AM MDT

The Gradle development team have not been taking it easy since the release of Gradle 1.0. New features and innovations are constantly being added, rough edges are being smoothed and the platform continues to expand. In this session we’ll explore the most notable additions to Gradle since the release of 1.0 and preview some of the new and exciting features just over the horizon with Gradle founder and Gradleware CEO Hans Dockter and Gradle core developer Peter Niederwieser.

Gradle continues to evolve with a high velocity to gain new capabilities, features and increased build performance.

We’ll dig into to some of the features incorporated since the 1.0 release, such as:

• Maven import and archetype support
• Parallel task execution
• Improved Dependency Reporting
• Dependency management improvements that make Grade the best dependency system out there.
• Additions to the task model like soft dependencies and finalizer tasks.
• Gradle Android and C/C++ Support
• Improvements to the Tooling API (i.e. embedded Gradle)
• Better scalability for large scale enterprise builds
• Using Jenkins slaves for distributed test execution.
• Deep integration with Arquillian for deploying to web and JEE servers.

We’ll also take a sneak peak at some of the upcoming features that will soon be available in Gradle.