In this episode we’ll be Test Talking with Julian Bucknall, the CTO at Developer Express about their open-source Web browser automation tool, TestCafe. Discover why TestCafe was created as well as how it can potentially help you and your teams with your test automation efforts.

About Julian Bucknall

Julian M Bucknall is a programmer by trade, a Chief Technology Officer by occupation, and an algorithms guy by osmosis. He’s been CTO at Developer Express for a good dozen years, during which time he’s encouraged and supported radical changes in the process for designing, writing, testing, and marketing user interface components, libraries, and tools.

Quotes & Insights from this Test Talk

• Almost eight years ago or something like that when you started writing this stuff and then we started to run into issues whereby you know there is a multitude of browsers out there, that we started initially writing mobile web controls and testing those were horrendous. And so we came to the conclusion that some having tried out Selenium as does everybody I’m sure it just wasn’t covering it for us. So we decided to try it write our own testing tool for the web for the controls that we were writing. So we’d be testing those controls in some kind of a demo application or we mimic some kind of real applications someone would write. And we do it with our controls. And to test those custom controls to make sure that they continue to work as we released new versions. So we really need it our own testing tool for the web. Because we saw started off with mobile we needed a testing that could to work on iOS and safari and Android and those were hard to come by. So we wrote TestCafe. Decided it was good enough to release and you know the rest is history.
• We are in earnest about this testing tool for testing web applications by making it open source. Maintaining sit as open source. Making sure that itself the APIs are open, that people can write for example plugins and so on and so forth for TestCafe. On our side write some kind of user interface to TestCafe so that you don’t have to be a super duper javascript capable and not worry about command line interface and all kinds of good stuff which is the opensource TestCafe.
• What we’re hoping is as people get to know TestCafe more of our customers will actually develop test cases with TestCafe that we could then run as part of our build process to make sure the bugs which have appeared to be fixed, stay fixed.
• We developed TestCafe to help us write better controls for the web but you don’t have to use our controls to use TestCafe. It’s completely separate.

Connect with Julian Bucknall

• Twitter: @DXTestCafe
• Blog:  devexpress.github.io/testcafe
• GitHub: https://github.com/DevExpress/testcafe

May I Ask You For a Favor?

Thanks again for listening to the show. If it has helped you in any way, shape or form, please share it using the social media buttons you see on the page.

Additionally, reviews for the podcast on iTunes are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated! They do matter in the rankings of the show and I read each and every one of them.

Test Talks is sponsored by the fantastic folks at Sauce Labs. Try it for free today!