Case Study: 548 Selenium Tests Help to Upgrade WhenWise to Rails 7 within 2 days

Real UI Test Automation and Continuous Testing is really useful, and tips on intensive automated regression testing.

I have witnessed a few software upgrade projects, such as Guidewire and SharePoint. Those projects usually took 6+ months for a 10+ staff team, functional testing is where the most effort (i.e. cost) is. I have done a number of framework upgrades (major version) for my own Ruby on Rails powered web apps, usually take 1 or 2 days, thanks to my Continuous Testing process.

Ruby on Rails 7.0 (web framework) was released on December 15th. I usually would upgrade my web apps to the latest Rails within the first week. This time was delayed because I was in the final stage of releasing my new book: ‘Practical Desktop App Test Automation with Appium’.

I started the upgrade on 25/12 (Xmas day), and finished today (27th, took two days). By the way, I did not work on this all the time, it is the Xmas break after all, family time takes priority.

My upgrading strategy is simple: To pass the automated End-to-End test suite, which consists of 548 Selenium WebDriver tests. If all tests pass, the job is done, deploy to production immediately. I have been doing this way for all my apps since 2012.

Learning test automation, if under proper guidance, it is easy. Maintaining a large test suite with…