Asana Apps Testing

Hari Mahesh

Asana is a web-based project management platform that helps teams organize, track, and collaborate on projects of all sizes. It offers features like creating tasks with due dates and assignees, choosing from multiple project view formats (list, calendar, Kanban board, etc.), automating workflows, and fostering communication through comments and updates. Asana integrates with many popular tools and offers various functionalities for planning, tracking, and reporting on projects, making it a valuable asset for boosting team productivity and ensuring project success.

This article discusses Asana, its various offerings, and how to test its integration with your business. We will also see which tools can help to test these Asana integrations effectively.

Solutions offered by Asana

Asana isn’t a suite of products but rather a powerful project management platform that offers different plans to cater to your team’s needs. Here’s a breakdown of their plans and focus areas:

• Asana Basic:
  • This is the accessible version of Asana, designed for individuals or small teams just getting started with project management.
  • It includes task assignments, due dates, and the ability to create projects and to-do lists.
• Asana Premium:
  • A step up from the Basic version, Asana Premium offers additional features for teams needing more robust planning and collaboration tools.
  • Key features include timeline views for planning projects, advanced search and reporting, custom fields, and task dependencies.
• Asana Business:
  • It is aimed at larger teams and organizations that require more sophisticated project management and reporting capabilities.
  • It includes everything in Premium plus portfolio management, workloads to see team capacities, custom rules builder for automating tasks, and advanced integrations with Salesforce, Adobe Creative Cloud, Tableau, and more.
• Asana Enterprise:
  • The most comprehensive solution is designed for organizations that need enterprise-grade security, control, and support.
  • Features include everything in the Business plan, user provisioning and de-provisioning, data export and deletion, block native integrations, custom branding, and priority support.
• Asana for Operations:
  • Tailored to help operations teams streamline processes and workflows.
  • It offers project and process management features, resource planning, and efficiency tracking.
• Asana for Sales and Account Management:
  • Designed to help sales teams manage their pipelines, integrate with CRM systems, and collaborate on account management.
• Asana for Marketing:
  • Provides tools for marketing teams to plan campaigns, manage content calendars, and collaborate on creative production.
• Asana for Product Teams:
  • Aimed at product teams needing to manage product roadmaps, feature requests, and launch plans.

Asana Apps Integrations

Asana offers various integrations with various apps to streamline workflows and enhance productivity. These integrations enable users to connect Asana with other daily tools, such as communication platforms like Slack, file storage services like Google Drive, or time-tracking apps like Toggl. This seamless integration allows teams to centralize their work in Asana while leveraging the functionalities of other tools, thereby reducing context switching and increasing efficiency.

One of the critical benefits of Asana’s app integration is its ability to automate repetitive tasks and create workflows across different platforms. For instance, users can set up triggers and actions using automation platforms like Zapier or Integromat to automatically create tasks in Asana based on specific events in other apps or vice versa. This saves time and ensures that information flows smoothly between different tools, keeping everyone on the team updated and aligned.

Connecting Asana to Your Business

Asana offers a robust API (Application Programming Interface) that allows developers to integrate Asana with various business tools using SDKs (Software Development Kits) and a CLI (Command-Line Interface). Here’s a breakdown of how this integration process works:

• Use Asana API: The Asana API provides a programmatic way to interact with Asana’s features. It allows you to automate tasks, create and manage projects, access and update data, and more. Asana provides comprehensive API documentation to guide developers through the integration process.
• Utilize SDKs for Simplified Development: Asana offers SDKs in various programming languages like Python, Java, Javascript, and more. These SDKs act as pre-built libraries that simplify interacting with the Asana API. They provide functions and tools designed to work with Asana’s data structures and functionalities. This streamlines development by eliminating the need to write code from scratch for every API interaction.
• Gain Control with Asana CLI: Asana also provides a Command-Line Interface (CLI) tool. This text-based interface allows developers to interact with the Asana API directly from their terminal. While less user-friendly than SDKs, the CLI offers more granular control over API requests and responses. It’s suitable for scripting tasks or integrating Asana into custom workflows.

Testing Asana Integrations

Building rock-solid Asana integrations requires rigorous testing at multiple levels. This ensures your creation functions flawlessly within the Asana ecosystem. We begin with unit testing, where each code component is scrutinized for perfect operation. This lays the groundwork for a stable integration. Next comes integration testing. Here, we verify how different parts of the integration work together seamlessly. This ensures smooth communication and data exchange between your creation and Asana.

But that’s not all! We go beyond the code itself with end-to-end testing. This simulates real-world user scenarios to uncover hidden issues that might arise during typical use. Finally, we employ non-functional testing. This assesses crucial aspects like performance, security, accessibility, and scalability. This ensures your integration functions efficiently, safeguards sensitive data, caters to diverse users, and adapts to future growth within the Asana environment.

Unit Testing Asana Integrations

Unit testing Asana integrations involves creating and running tests that verify the minor parts of an application—in this case, the parts that integrate with Asana. These tests focus on the interaction between your application and the Asana API, ensuring that your application uses Asana’s endpoints to create tasks, retrieve information, update data, etc.

Let’s break down what’s typically tested, the benefits of unit testing these integrations, and the tools commonly used.

What’s Tested?

• API Request Formation: Verify your application builds accurate API requests for Asana. This includes the correct HTTP method (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE), essential headers, and body content.
• API Response Handling: Ensuring your application can correctly interpret responses from Asana, including both successful replies and various error scenarios like rate limits, unauthorized access, or malformed requests.
• Data Parsing and Manipulation: Testing your application’s ability to accurately parse the data received from Asana and manipulate it if necessary (e.g., extracting specific task details or updating a task).
• Authentication and Authorization: Verifying that your application adheres to Asana’s authentication mechanisms, ensuring proper login and authorization to perform requested operations.
• Error Handling and Recovery: Ensuring your application gracefully handles errors that might occur during interaction with Asana, such as network failures or API changes.
• Rate Limiting: Testing how your application behaves when approaching Asana’s rate limits, ensuring it queues requests appropriately or fails gracefully.

Benefits of Unit Testing Asana Apps

• Enhanced Reliability: Unit testing strengthens the reliability of your integration, guaranteeing consistent and predictable interactions between your application and Asana.
• Early Bug Detection: By identifying and fixing bugs early in the development cycle, you save valuable time and resources compared to fixing issues later.
• Living Documentation: These tests act as living documentation for your code, explaining how your application interacts with Asana. This simplifies future maintenance and understanding for developers.
• Refactoring Confidence: Unit testing empowers you to refactor your integration code confidently, knowing the tests will catch any unintended changes that might break functionality.
• Improved Design: The process of unit testing inherently encourages better design practices. You’ll be forced to consider the application’s structure and interaction with external services like Asana.

Unit Testing Tools

Asana doesn’t have its unit testing tools. The unit testing tools for Asana integrations mainly depend on the programming language you use for the integration. Here’s a breakdown of some popular options for different languages:

• Python
  • pytest: A popular and flexible testing framework focusing on simplicity and readability.
  • unittest: The built-in Python unit testing framework offers a solid foundation for unit tests.
• Java
  • JUnit: The industry standard for unit testing in Java, providing a comprehensive framework with features like test runners and assertions.
• JavaScript
  • Jest: A robust testing framework offering features like test watching, code coverage, and snapshot testing.
  • Mocha: A flexible testing framework that allows for various assertion libraries and test runners.
• Language-Specific Mocking Frameworks: Consider mocking frameworks alongside your chosen unit testing tool. Mocking allows you to simulate Asana API responses during unit tests without interacting with the absolute Asana service. This can improve test isolation and execution speed. Popular mocking frameworks include:
  • Python: mock
  • Java: Mockito
  • JavaScript: Sinon.js

Integration Testing Asana Integrations

Integration testing Asana integrations encompass a broader scope than unit testing, focusing on the interactions between your application and Asana to ensure they work together seamlessly. This testing looks at the entire interaction process, from sending requests to Asana’s API to handling responses and integrating the data into your application’s workflows. Let’s clarify the components involved in integration testing for Asana integrations, its benefits over unit testing, and the tools to facilitate these tests.

What’s Tested?

• Complete Workflows: Integration tests cover complete workflows such as creating a project, adding tasks, assigning users, and updating task statuses. The goal is to ensure that sequences of API calls and the handling of their responses work as expected.
• Authentication and Authorization Flows: These tests ensure that the application correctly implements Asana’s OAuth flow, manages access tokens, and adequately handles expired or revoked tokens.
• Error Handling and Edge Cases: Integration testing examines how the application responds to API errors like rate limits or unavailable services, incorrect data inputs, and other edge cases.
• Performance and Scalability: Tests may evaluate how the integration performs under load, such as handling many simultaneous API calls to Asana, ensuring that the application scales well and remains responsive.
• Data Integrity and Synchronization: Ensures data remains consistent between the application and Asana. This includes verifying that changes made through one interface are accurately reflected in the other.
• Third-Party Integrations: If your application integrates with Asana and other services, integration tests can verify that these multiple integrations work well without conflicts or data discrepancies.

Benefits of Integration Testing Asana Apps

• Enhanced Integration Reliability: Verifying components’ interactions reduces the risk of integration failures and ensures a more stable and dependable solution.
• Early Detection of Integration Issues: Integration testing helps catch issues early in the development lifecycle, leading to quicker fixes and preventing them from reaching later stages where they might be more costly.
• Improved Confidence in Functionality: A comprehensive integration testing suite bolsters your confidence that the integration operates as intended across diverse scenarios, fostering trust in its overall reliability.
• Reduced Risk of Regression: Regression testing within your integration testing process helps maintain functionality even after code modifications are made, minimizing the risk of inadvertently breaking existing features.

Integration Testing Tools

A combination of API and UI testing tools is essential for integration testing of Asana integrations. These tools help validate the functionality, reliability, performance, and security of your application’s integration with Asana.

Here’s a breakdown of popular API and UI testing tools frequently used for integration testing of Asana Apps.

API Testing Tools

• Postman: Postman is a widely used tool for API testing that allows developers to send HTTP requests to Asana’s API. It supports automated testing with scripting and a collection runner to execute a series of API calls and evaluate their responses.
• SoapUI: SoapUI is another powerful tool for testing REST and SOAP services. It can handle advanced API testing, including asynchronous testing, and supports functional and load testing.
• JMeter: Apache JMeter is great for load testing and supports functional API testing. It can test performance on static and dynamic resources (files, Servlets, Perl scripts, Java Objects, Databases and Queries, FTP Servers, and more).

UI Testing Tools

• Selenium: Selenium is a commonly used test automation tool for the UI level. We can look into Selenium in more detail in the E2E phase.

End-to-End Testing Asana Integrations

End-to-end (E2E) testing for Asana integrations involves testing the integration from the user’s perspective, ensuring the system functions correctly. It simulates real user scenarios, verifying that the application communicates effectively with Asana’s API and that the data flow between your application and Asana works seamlessly from end to end.

This type of testing encompasses both the UI and backend services, offering a comprehensive assessment of the integration’s performance under real-world conditions.

What’s Tested?

• User Workflows: E2E testing simulates real-world scenarios a user might encounter when interacting with your Asana integration. This can involve creating tasks, assigning them to colleagues, updating statuses, adding comments, attaching files, and interacting with other relevant functionalities.
• Data Flow and Consistency: Testing verifies that data flows seamlessly between your application and Asana. This includes verifying that actions taken within your application (e.g., creating a task) are accurately reflected in Asana and vice versa (e.g., updates made in Asana are reflected in your application).
• UI Interactions: E2E testing ensures that user interactions with your application’s UI elements (buttons, menus, forms) trigger the expected actions and result in the desired outcomes within the Asana integration.
• Error Handling: Simulate potential errors (e.g., network issues, authentication failures) to verify how your integration behaves and recovers from them gracefully. Users should receive informative error messages, and the integration should strive to maintain functionality where possible.

Benefits of E2E Testing for Asana Integrations

• Improved User Experience: E2E testing helps identify usability issues and ensures a smooth and intuitive user experience.
• Reduced Risk of Integration Issues: By simulating real-world usage patterns, E2E testing catches potential integration problems that unit or API tests might miss.
• Enhanced Confidence in Functionality: E2E testing provides a more holistic view of your integration’s functionality, giving you greater confidence in its overall reliability.

End-to-End Testing Tools

Here, we discuss Selenium and testRigor as choices for end-to-end testing of Asana.

Selenium

As we discussed earlier, Selenium was a commonly used UI automation tool by many companies. The main advantage of Selenium is that it is open-source; anyone can customize the framework. However, using Selenium has many disadvantages, such as code complexity. As the automation code count increases, debugging becomes impossible, and more time will be spent on maintenance tasks.

There are many other reasons why Selenium is not used for automation testing anymore. Here, we are not covering much detail about Selenium, but if you would like to know about building Selenium tests, you can refer to this blog.

One of the most commonly used tools explicitly designed for E2E testing is testRigor. Let us learn about it in detail.

testRigor

Today’s organizations demand more from their test automation tools. Gone are the days of clunky, code-heavy solutions. Thankfully, testRigor steps in, seamlessly addressing modern challenges with its innovative, generative AI-powered, codeless approach. Its intuitive interface empowers teams to craft and execute comprehensive end-to-end test cases rapidly in plain English, ensuring quality software is delivered at high speed.

Let’s highlight some of testRigor’s advantages over other E2E tools, starting with its initial setup:

• Cloud-hosted: testRigor eliminates the need for companies to invest in setting up and maintaining their own test automation infrastructure and device cloud. This translates to significant savings in time, effort, and cost. Once teams are signed in and subscribed, they can start testing immediately.
• Natural Language Automation: testRigor stands out by enabling users to write test scripts in parsed plain English, eliminating the need for coding expertise. This empowers a broader range of team members, including manual QA testers, management, business analysts, and stakeholders, to contribute to automated test creation. This also improves the test case coverage, thereby covering more testing scenarios, finding more bugs, and making the application more stable.
• Stable Element Locators: Unlike traditional tools that rely on specific element identifiers, testRigor uses a unique approach for element locators. You simply describe elements by the text you see on the screen, leveraging the power of AI to find them automatically. This means your tests adapt to changes in the application’s UI, eliminating the need to update fragile selectors constantly. This helps the team focus more on creating new use cases than fixing the flaky XPaths. Here is an example where you identify elements with the text you see for them on the screen.

  click "cart"
  click on the button "Delete" below "Section Name"

• Web Testing: Supports web testing on desktop and mobile across 3,000+ browsers, devices, and OS combinations—for instance, Internet Explorer on Windows and Safari on Mac and iOS.
• One Tool For All Testing Types: testRigor performs more than just web automation. It can be used for:
  • Web and Mobile browser testing
  • Mobile app testing
  • Desktop app testing
  • API testing
  • Visual testing
  • Accessibility testing

So you don’t have to install different tools for different types of testing. testRigor takes care of all your testing needs singlehandedly.

login as customer //reusable rule
click "Accounts"
click "Manage Accounts."
click "Enable International Transactions"
enter stored value "daily limit value" into "Daily Limit"
click "Save"
click "Account Balance" roughly to the left of "Debit Cards"
check the page contains "Account Balance"

You can go through more features of testRigor and its documentation.

FAQs

• Does testRigor support the record and playback option?
  Yes, testRigor has record-and-playback capabilities that help you create test cases in plain English based on your actions. Here is the testRigor’s recorder, which you can use to record a test, just like with any similar tool. Otherwise, you can use the generative AI features to generate most test cases automatically. You can also import your manual test cases and tweak them to make them executable by testRigor.
• What should I do if I need to integrate Jira with testRigor?
  You don’t have to do anything; there is no need to write any extra code or import any additional dependencies. testRigor has built-in integrations with most of the tools from various platforms. To name a few:
  • All test case management systems, including TestRail, Zephyr, XRay, etc.
  • Ticketing systems like Jira, Pivotal Tracker, Azure DevOps, etc.
  • All CI platforms, including Jenkins, CircleCI, Azure DevOps, etc.
  • All infrastructure providers, including LambdaTest, BrowserStack, SauceLabs, etc.
  • PagerDuty
• What are the other compliances that testRigor supports?
  testRigor is SOC2 and HIPAA compliant and supports FDA 21 CFR Part 11 reporting. You can efficiently perform accessibility testing through testRigor. Read here how to build an ADA-compliant app.

“We spent so much time on maintenance when using Selenium, and we spend nearly zero time with maintenance using testRigor.”

Keith Powe VP Of Engineering - IDT