Adobe Experience Manager: How to start working as an AEM Author and Quality Engineer
They say -
“Lots of methodologies have come and gone, paradigms have changed but the requirements are always the same; Make it good and make it fast.”
One of the recent established methodologies which is used to build good websites in a fast process is Adobe experience management also frequently known as AEM.
What is AEM?
Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) is a comprehensive content management solution for building websites, mobile apps and forms. And it makes it easy to manage your marketing content and assets.
Since the very first day of my internship till now I have been working with AEM. As days pass, the software becomes more enjoyable and shows its versatility and ease of use with proper content management processes and systematical workflows.
AEM basically provides the users two types of environments which are -
- Author instance
- Publish instance
I have been working as a Software Quality Engineer and an AEM Author who manages contents using the software. And I must say AEM never stops amazing me with its functionality and ease of use.
The Essentials
The first and foremost rule to work with AEM is to have the essential user access rights to operate the system. It is usually located behind a company’s firewall that provides full protection and requires the author to login, using an account that has been assigned the appropriate access rights. The two main access rights for an author are author access and approve access which restricts the access criteria.
The users who have author access can only manage the content. They may have some restrictions in publishing the pages or deleting them. To manage these restrictions, the author needs to trigger some workflows which an approver will receive. The approver will decide whether to complete the request or not.
On the other hand, the approver has all the access to publish,unpublish, create or delete the page.
Based on your work purpose you need to get your access rights to complete your required objective.
What is authoring and how to start it?
As the system has two environments it is essential to test both of the environments.
These two environments interact to enable the user to make content available on client’s website — so that visitors can read it.
The author works in what is known as the Author Environment. This provides an easy to use graphical user interface for creating the content.
The author environment provides the mechanisms for creating, updating and reviewing this content before actually publishing it.
So, if you are working as an AEM tester you need to be proficient in working both as an author and publisher.
Before starting it is very necessary defining the purpose of the work. What needs to be done and what needs not to be done to fulfill your task at hand.
The main purpose of an author is to create and review the content by using several authoring functionalities. This includes the basic testing of your AEM site.
The basic authoring can be consisting of page creation, assets, publications, etc. which will, at some point, be published to the live website.
On the author environment the functionality of AEM is made available through two UIs. For the publish environment you design the entire look-and-feel of the interface made available to your users.
Depending on how author’s instance and personal access rights are configured the author can perform many tasks inside the content such as:
- Generating new content, or edit existing content, on a page
- Using predefined templates to create new content pages
- Creating new templates to manage the design
- Create, edit and manage assets and collections
- Create, edit and manage publications
- Move, copy or delete content pages, assets, etc.
- Publish (or unpublish) pages, assets, etc.
Working with the components
Now when the author is familiarized with basic content creating perception, the next step comes is working with the components.
It is obvious that a site cannot be published just only by creating pages. The pages need some inner contents which can be designed by components which are built for a specific site. Some components can also be used as common components which are reusable in multiple sites known as core components.
While testing a component the author or you can determine some steps the tester should follow which I followed as an author.
Follow the design
Designing the same UI which is provided by the designer using the components. Here the main test purpose is to examine whether the author is able to design the same page using the components or they are slightly different. If the design is completely different or cannot be created identically then sorry my mate you have more work to do!
Checking the publish view
After designing the pages if you want to become a good QA engineer you should surely check the UI in responsive view and also in different browsers. Now for this there might be some uncertainty whether to publish the pages or not. To make these complications easier AEM introduced view as published option which has the same view of the page as publish instance.
Kitchen Sink Page design
Now for the components each of the components you use might have different functionalities. You can check the UI of all the components by adding them inside one page. We call it “Kitchen sink Page” design. This page includes every single Foundation element so that we can make sure things work together smoothly.
Component Functionalities
To check the functionality, you need to test each component separately according to their behavior. If a component has too many features or behavior you can surely go for combinations. I always do combinations of scenarios which makes testing much easier.
Page properties and Tags
The author can also check the page properties or can lock a page. The page property configuration can be varied by page template creation. Each template can consist different options inside their page properties. This is to maintain the separate functionality of separate pages.
What more an author can do is create tags if your websites contain any. These Tags are simple pieces of data that describe information on your web page. The Tags provide details about an item and make it easy to locate related items that have the same tag.
Resolution
I believe “The principle objective of software testing is to give confidence in the software.”
AEM ensures the user to fulfill the objective by providing reliance and making the environment enjoyable. By using AEM the user can assuredly create the preferable website with an enjoyable workflow and seamless effort if they know how to do it and know the software and workflow in the proper manner.
Reference
https://www.adobe.com/marketing/experience-manager.html
For further discussion, feel free to reach out to me anytime!
Tanzila Tabassum
Associate SQA Engineer
Brain Station 23 LTD
Email : tanzila@bs-23.net
