Further planning for doing my coding demo project

Since I continue to have time on my hands and no active leads bringing me in for interviews this coming week (so far), I’m moving forward with laying down the plans for my coding demo.

As I said in my last post about this (here for those of you reading on Dreamwidth), I’ve succeeded in setting up a test WordPress site in Docker.

The rest of this operation is going to look something like this, at least for phase 1 of this project:

• Actually get some content into that test WordPress site. This will probably involve just doing a database copy down from my backup WordPress site up on angelahighland.wordpress.com. If for some reason I can’t do that, I’ll install a lorem ipsum generator plugin (there are a few for WordPress, I looked) and generate purely random content.
• Study up on the REST API WordPress makes available for any given install.
• Once I know what service endpoints are available, use that to scope out what test cases I can do.
• Write out those test cases in a Java BVT suite, similar to the ones I wrote at Big Fish. Tools I will need for this: IntelliJ, TestNG.

A possible Phase 2 for this project will involve extending the testing to include front-end testing. In other words (for those of you unfamiliar with how web testing works), hitting the pages of the test site in a browser and verifying that expected things are there, and/or that you are able to do certain things (e.g., log in, do a search, leave a comment). Tools I will need for this: Selenium (also in a Docker image), with a side helping of the Selenide framework. This would be a followup on my previous research that I did as one of my last projects at Big Fish.

Possible stretch goal: replicate some of the same test cases in Python, just to brush up on my Python skills. Tools I’d be using in this part of the work: PyCharm.

I’ve been writing out some tasks for myself in Things, by way of a task breakdown, and I suppose this blog post kind of counts as a spec. Ha. :D

And when I’ve got some actual code, I’ll be checking it in on my personal Github account. This will be fun, hopefully, as well as a way to keep my skills active until such time as I can convince somebody to give me another job!

(EDITING TO ADD: This, by the way, is a separate project I’m planning in addition to doing a WordPress plugin! So I’ll have multiple things I can eventually point at by way of demonstrating I can code. What I’m talking about in this post is more along the lines of demonstrating something similar to the last code I wrote at Big Fish.)

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.

The WordPress testing demo project is now underway

Spent most of today (very roughly during ‘work’ hours, just to try to keep to the whole idea of coding to a schedule) working on the WordPress testing demo project I talked about in my last post. As of this writing, I have some actual working things checked in up on Github. There’s only one functional test case so far, but it’s a start!

What I accomplished today:

• Creating a Github repo for this work
• Read about the API endpoints that WordPress makes available for any given site, some of which are publicly viewable, others of which require you to log in as a valid user
• Started a Postman Collection to keep track of the endpoints I’ll be playing with for my test site, and checked an initial version of this in on Github
• Refreshed my memory about how Unirest works, as this was the library we used at Big Fish to talk to various services; maybe not the most current library to use, but it’s the one I know, so I’m going with this for demo purposes
• Got IntelliJ on the Linux partition of my dev laptop updated to the latest version
• Built the actual project in IntelliJ, as a Maven project, so it’d have the correct file structure and a pom.xml file I could add dependencies to
• Started building a client class that will use Unirest to hit those endpoints for my local test site
• Built a BaseTest class in charge of doing setup used by all the test classes I’ll be making
• Built a TestPosts class to start the test cases for the “Posts” endpoints in the aforementioned API, and now it even has an initial functional test case!

Now that I have an actual working (if tiny) framework here, I should be able to fill in some test cases reasonably quickly.

Note also that the test suite assumes I am running the WordPress test site locally. For bonus usefulness I should make some sort of healthcheck test case that verifies that the test site is in fact UP.

Mirrored from annathepiper.org.