GTAC 2011: BidiChecker: Automated Bidi Testing of Web Applications October 31, 2011

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6th Annual Google Test Automation Conference 2011 (GTAC 2011)
"Cloudy With A Chance Of Tests"
Computer History Museum
Mountain View, CA USA
October 26-27, 2011

Presented by Yana Margolin and Jason Elbaum.

ABSTRACT

BidiChecker is a tool for the automated testing of web pages for errors in support of right-to-left (RTL) languages, also known as bidirectional (bidi) because they routinely include left-to-right items such as numbers and Latin-script words and phrases. Bidi support for a web page is a common requirement, even for pages in left-to-right scripts. Any page which accepts user input or displays multilingual content is likely to end up handling bidirectional text at some point, as it will eventually encounter data in Arabic, Hebrew or another RTL language. BidiChecker provides a Javascript API which can be easily integrated into an existing test suite. It also supports a browser bookmarklet which lets you run the checks manually on any web page and browse through the errors highlighted on the page. We'll talk a bit about common bidi bugs, then describe and demonstrate BidiChecker.

Yana Margolin joined Google in 2009. Since then she's been in charge of testing bidirectional text support implementation across various Google applications. Her focus includes promoting BidiChecker - an internally developed, open-sourced, automated tool for bidirectional text handling testing, as well as facilitating product development teams to switch from manual testing model to an automated one. Prior to Google, Yana was a QA Team Manager at WebCollage Israel LTD, a content syndication provider, who built the company's testing team from scratch.

Jason Elbaum has been at Google since 2008, where he develops infrastructure for supporting bidirectional languages. Before that he spent nine years at Motorola/Freescale Semiconductor. He has degrees in computer science from Princeton University and economics from the London School of Economics, and worked at Imperial College London as a research assistant in petroleum engineering (really!). Originally from suburban Washington, D.C., he now lives with his wife and two kids in Israel, where he umpires Little League baseball.