Rant on Login Screen examples

If you are demonstrating testing technologies or testing examples around RPA, ML, Selenium and so on – Please: DO NOT USE A LOGIN FORM!

The test scenarios I usually deal with are not this… mundane. While a few testers probably still have to build login forms from scratch, a login feature is a commodity by now. Use OAuth for public facing sites and Active Directory Federation internally in the organisation. Really – there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. To the end user and even the Product Owner logging in is just a stepping stone. 

I just want to log in, and then I’m done for the day

Said no user ever*

Showing that you can train an AI network or other framework to login might solve a tedius testing task, but is usually not the thing I’m after. When a user is logged in, they are there to solve something, to process something, to do something – to engage with something. And this is where the best tests are heading too – this is the tests that adds value to the business and tells something about the product. 

For instance: In one project I did, we disabled the login entirely to make the CI/CD run feature testing. The plain login screen was temporary anyways, as the solution authentication would be based on certificates. We never spend much time on it, neither on total coverage.

A QA engineer walks into a bar. Orders a beer. Orders 0 beers. Orders 99999999999 beers. Orders a lizard. Orders -1 beers. Orders a ueicbksjdhd.

First real customer walks in and asks where the bathroom is. The bar bursts into flames, killing everyone.

— Brenan Keller (@brenankeller) November 30, 2018

Less combinations – More Real Life Scenarios

So what can you use as an example instead of login boxes and combinatoric bar stories? How about anonymizing the latest test you had to do on your latest live-action testing project? This will tell me about your challenges, your business domain and when the last time was – among other things.

Let me start, as of writing the latest test case I touched (same day as writing this) was for a new public data registration project. The tester and end user “subject matter expert” was testing the data registration form from both a GUI and web-services perspective. Export the entered data form as XML and import it again via web-services to see the consistency.

Could that be tool supported – maybe. The knowledge about the system is not very explicit. It’s a bit complicated, actually. Could it be trained by an ML/AI system – I doubt it. There is no global training set for this class of systems – we have the old version but are adding new things. 

If you are (a tool vendor) demonstrating something – do try to understand the context and problems your customers are trying to solve first. Ask them what their latest tests were and where the challenges are. If it’s a login box you’re good to go, but I doubt it. 

*: Unless you are somehow measured on “logging in”. For instance to claim unemployment benefit, login to job site daily…Snap! OTOH shallow measure.