Ian On The Red Dot

Xvfb:

In the X Window System, Xvfb or X virtual framebuffer is an X11 server that performs all graphical operations in memory, not showing any screen output. From the point of view of the client, it acts exactly like any other server, serving requests and sending events and errors as appropriate. However, no output is shown. This virtual server does not require the computer it is running on to even have a screen or any input device.

Running Selenium on a Solaris server so that can run Cucumber tests via Hudson daily after each successful build. The problem was Selenium + Firefox had no display to output to.

The solution was to use xvfb and output to it.

I understand the principle behind the separation of the development and testing teams – every programmer suffers from momentary lapses of judgement brought on by the ‘it is my baby’ feeling towards their code which makes them perform less rigorous testing.

It would not be presumptuous to assume a testing team incentivized to find bugs in an application will perform more rigorous testing and act as a perfect foil to the development team.

In theory.

In practice, if the testing team does not have the knowledge of the business requirements and application, if the team does not have the skill-set to track what’s going on with an application, if they have to rely on the development team to interpret results then the whole point of separation is lost.

The testing team needs to be able to operate independently from the development team when determining why a test case fails.

It is also not sufficient for the testing team to say a test case has failed. The testing team needs to be able to ascertain the point in the business process where the error occurred which is possible with logging and information from the database.

If they can never understand the ‘why’ then the chances of false positives and false negatives increase.

And seriously, Google is your friend. In case you forgot how to use Google, click this link.