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I’m an independent IT consultant and entrepreneur in the Internet and software business. I’m interested in design, enterprise applications, web apps and SaaS products. I design and develop business solutions and applications. I help companies in terms of software quality and knowledge transfer, e.g. with Angular and Spring Boot.

Alicia Sedlock: “The Landscape of Front-End Testing” at Fronteers Conference 2017

Alicia Sedlock - “The Landscape of Front-End Testing” at Fronteers Conference 2017: Alicia Sedlock: "The Landscape of Front-End Testing" at Fronteers Conference 2017 from Fronteers on Vimeo.

Testing REST Services with REST Assured

RESTful service testing can be unwieldy and difficult to get started with. Providing a REST API implies using a variety of technologies and techniques such as HTTP, JSON, authentication, various payload transfer mechanisms and content types. This is where a tool that abstracts over these technical details and facilitates their application comes in handy. REST Assured is a high-level DSL for testing REST APIs. It draws upon behaviour-driven development (BDD) and hence makes for readable test descriptions. A typical acceptance test with ...

Sunday April 30th, 2017 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Software

Advice On Improving JavaScript Test Speed (by Shyp Engineering)

On their blog engineers of logistics service Shyp (defunct) talk about how they improved the turn-around times of their JavaScript test suite by an order of magnitude of 3 (i.e. 1000x), which is no small achievement. In a modern software development process continuous integration and continuous deployment play a vital role. These ensure that your software always is in an deliverable, tested state and ideally is deployed to production systems in a timely manner when a change has been made. This process ...

Sunday January 31st, 2016 by Bjoern in Enterprise Software, Front End Development, Software, Web Applications

Houdini – Automatically Generated Web App Tests

Houdini is was a new SaaS product - currently in private beta - that "watches you using your site and automatically generates end to end tests that run continuously in the cloud". After having added some JavaScript code to your web app Houdini will follow and record your clicks, inputs and actions. These recordings are then used for automatically generating tests that run continuously. So, if a code change breaks your app's front end behaviour you will be informed about this. This is ...

Sunday February 2nd, 2014 by Bjoern in Web Applications

BromBone – Headless Browser As A Service

A few weeks ago I wrote about PhantomJS, CasperJS and how those WebKit-based tools help with web app testing. While running your own PhantomJS instance should work alright in most cases, installing, optimizing and maintaining yet another software package on all of your dev machines and continuous integration servers adds more friction to your development process. Hence, I was wondering if there's a hosted PhantomJS service. In fact, there is: BromBone - a 'headless browser as a service'. BromBone is an infrastructure-as-a-service offering ...

Sunday April 7th, 2013 by Bjoern in Web Applications

Acceptance Testing With PhantomJS and CasperJS

PhantomJS is a headless WebKit browser that allows you to call, test and scrape websites from the command line. In the developer's own words: PhantomJS is a headless WebKit with JavaScript API. It has fast and native support for various web standards: DOM handling, CSS selector, JSON, Canvas, and SVG. CasperJS is a testing and scripting framework that builds on PhantomJS. Again, in the developer's own words: CasperJS is an open source navigation scripting & testing utility written in Javascript and based on PhantomJS ...

Sunday March 10th, 2013 by Bjoern in Front End Development, Web Applications

Björn Wilmsmann