Automated System Testing for Web Apps at CF.Objective

I'm excited to to have the honor of once again presenting at the CF.Objective() Enterprise ColdFusion Conference. This year I'll be talking about Automated System Testing for Web Applications with CFSelenium, MXUnit, and Jenkins.

I've been a Quality Assurance software developer since 2007 when I was on the ColdFusion server engineering team at Adobe. For the past couple years I've enjoyed working at FirstComp Insurance with one of the largest ColdFusion developer teams that I know of, including well known team members like Sam Farmer, Dan Vega, and Jason Delmore, as well as many others of ColdFusion's best.

Testing by Isolation
One of my goals last year was to create a test suite framework that could perform Automated System Testing of our collection of web applications that we use for our business. We run it all on ColdFusion with a truly massive code base, and we have many different web applications that drive different parts of the business, each with unique user interfaces (UI). Part of good development practices includes writing Unit Tests early in the project to test application modules (CFCs) in isolation. Unit Tests are great for catching issues early in the release cycle, but they don't test how all the parts work together across the whole application as a system.

Testing Across the Board
This is where System Testing (or UI Testing) comes in, and I'll be showing you how I built our automated UI test framework from the ground up.

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  Could not find ColdFusion component or interface Query

My best blogging years were when I worked in ColdFusion Technical Support, from Allaire and right on thru Macromedia then Adobe. Constantly fielding customer questions provided an endless source of fodder to investigate and blog about when a solution or workaround was found. It feels a little like old times again now that my QA team is expanding and I've been helping others come up to speed with our ColdFusion driven Automated Test Suite. Although my colleagues are experienced web professionals, I'm happy there is room for mentoring in ColdFusion, and that provides me with more fodder to share here.

After helping someone install ColdFusion 9.0 and apply the 9.01 updater, they reported the updater failed to complete. We cleaned things up a bit, confirmed installers, and tried again. Success. Shortly after, we continued setting up the test suite environment they reported a very unusual error that I'd never seen before, Could not find the ColdFusion component or interface Query. With a bit of Googling, I found that there were only 2 hits, and one was in a comment on Ben Nadel's blog where he provided the winning hint. The other hit was a tweet about it when someone else encountered this issue.

Per Ben's hint, I had my colleague check the CF Admin's Custom Tag mappings, and the source of the problem was immediately evident. The core mapping for "C:\ColdFusion9\CustomTags" was missing. Prior to then, I thought this mapping was immutable by the end user of the CF Admin. Perhaps it was due to the initial failed 9.01 updater, I'm not really sure how that mapping got wiped out, but as soon as we restored it, everything worked.

The mapping is needed because some parts of the Core CFML language are implemented as custom tags stored in that core location. This includes the query.cfc tag, which implements the script-based version of CFQuery. Without that mapping, there will be several language areas that won't work.

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  No April Fools: Selenium Shipped Soon to Expire SSL Certificate

QA Engineers everywhere woke up today and rolled into the office with the usual dread that Monday morning's bring, only to find out their day just got even worse because all of their selenium driven, automated test suites all came crashing to a halt on Sunday, April 1st 2012. Every test would halt with an SSL Certificate warning message "Error code: sec_error_expired_issuer_certificate".

It took me a 15 minutes of scratching my head, looking at test success history on Friday (when they all passed) and comparing that to any changes in the test suite (there had been none in the last few days). Then it hit me that that the culprit might be that darned CyberVillians' certificate that ships in Selenium. Once that dawned on me, I dug up the selenium-server-2.0.0.jar file, extracted, and checked out the cybervilliansCA.cer in the sslSupport subdirectory.

I had been using Selenium 2.0, which includes it’s own SSL certificate called ‘cybervillainsCA.cer’ bundled into the server. It uses that SSL certificate to proxy/intercept the SSL requests to the Application Under Test. Well, apparently that cert has an expiration date of March 31, 2012, and I ran smack into it. This caused all tests to fail because Selenium could not proxy SSL anymore.

To correct the problem, I had to update the Selenium server version to 2.20, which should be good for another 20 years since they had the good sense to make it expire in 2031 this time.

The Selenium Server 2.0 Expired Certificate:

The Selenium Server 2.20 Certificate Valid Until 2031: