Our first Agile Quality Engineering product

Our search for automation tools that suits our environment, people and priorities led us to Robot Framework, a popular open-source tool with several external libraries that enable the automation of end-to-end test scenarios and Appium, an open source mobile test automation framework.

Seeing the potential in both tools, we spent a huge amount of effort to integrate Robot Framework with Appium, so we could perform web and mobile automation in parallel.

We were so pleased with our successful integration that we wanted to share it and help more people benefit from it. This led to us develop Hive Agile Testing Solutions or hats.

What is hats?

hats is a functional test automation tool for web and mobile applications. It allows you to define end-to-end test scenarios and implement the test steps/actions, together with assertion checks.

At the end of the automated tests, an HTML report is generated that allows you to determine the total execution time, pass/fail test cases and the step at which the failure happens, if any. hats leverages the technical know-how of the Agile experts at Hive, as well as our experience with Agile testing, to help the Singapore Government deliver more robust and stable digital services.

Why hats?

1. hats allows users to create their test scenarios using the “Specification by Examples” or, as we like to call it, “English-style” scripting. Writing your test cases in this manner helps to shift the entire QA focus among the team as well as the business stakeholders. Everyone in the team is able to understand the test scenarios and contribute to them. Here is an example of a test script:

1. Users are able to run regression tests in parallel. This saves time and provides early feedback to the development team for any code-breaks.
2. hats can be executed in parallel in various browsers and mobile devices, so you can be sure your application is able to run on these platforms.
3. Continuous testing can be achieved by integrating hats into the Continuous Integration (CI) process, which is a very important Agile Continuous Delivery (CD) component.

Below is a sneak preview of hats in action:

hats in execution, running automated test cases in browsers and mobile devices concurrently.

Future of hats

The future of hats is promising. We have a huge list of product features with lots of focus on usability, and ease of script development and configurations. We also plan to add on security assessment, and load and performance capabilities. This will make hats a comprehensive product that government agencies can rely on to deliver high quality digital services for our citizens and businesses.

Who to contact for hats?

You can always contact me if you are keen to find out more or to request a POC on hats. Just drop me an email or telegram me.

Accolades for hats

hats is started and developed by a group of quality engineers who spent countless hours of personal time working on it because we believe it’s the right thing to do. We would love hats to reach more people, shape the way they think about quality engineering and ultimately, improve the quality of government digital services.

Special thanks to people who have contributed to hats — Ryan, Michelle, Syam, Malique, Wendy, Nina, Moneesh, Hoon Ling, Jin Jie, Owali, Xyng Fei, Mani, Zi Yun, Winnie and Stephanie. Also, we would like to thank Steven and Mark for the management support and guidance rendered to hats team.

If this sounds just like what you love to do, we are hiring … :)