Allan Crisp of Jet2.com delivered an interesting presentation at our networking event for Test Managers, discussing being a non-Tester and looking after Test, as well aas adventures in Automation.
The Zero-ETL Approach: Enhancing Data Agility and Insight
Being a non-Tester and looking after Test
1.
2. What am I going to talk about?
About Jet2
Who am I?
I’m not a test professional – how does that work?
Adventures in automation!
3. Who are we?
We are part of the Dart Group PLC – a £1.2billion+ Turnover Business
The Dart Group has been running for 40 years and is made up of 3
Companies:
Fowler Welch is our Logistics Provider, transporting fast moving consumer
goods (FMCG)
Jet2.com is our leisure Airline
Jet2holidays is our Tour Operator
4. Our History
Jet2.com formed in 2002; first flights in 2003
First flight was to Amsterdam
In our first year we carried 360,000 passengers
In 2014/2015 we carried over 5 million passengers
Jet2holidays was formed in 2007
In our first year we had circa 35,000 holiday passengers
We had over 1 million holiday passengers in 2014/2015
3 biggest UK Tour Operator; 2nd biggest in the North
5. Who am I?
Started out as a developer
Moved to London and ran support for DHL before taking charge
of development and then test (almost by accident)
Ended up running Support, Development and Test at DHL
before the business was sold and became Yodel
Joined Jet2.com in 2012
6. I’m not a test professional – how does that work?
It’s interesting!
Pros
I also look after prod support – so I can see the effects of our testing in the live environment and gently
steer things to improve quality in the future
I can assist the team with technical blockers, e.g. database access
The team are given autonomy to get on with it and I’ll only wade in by exception
With a dev background I like to get involved and help/interfere on the automation side
Challenges
Fighting urge to challenge test estimates! It’s hard to have empathy with something you’ve never done
yourself
Finding the time to devote to the test team given my other responsibilities
We’ve got a great team that works hard and gets results
7. Adventures in Automation
Test Automation at Jet2 has been like a mini version of the Matrix
(bear with me on this!)
Jet2 Automation version 1
Started in Summer 2011 (before I joined)
3 FTEs tasked with automating test using Selenium Webdriver
The next slide contains a list of the things that the team managed to
automate in that time
8.
9. Adventures in Automation
Jet2 Test Automation part 2.
Meet “Automation Dave”
Automation Dave built us an all-singing, all-dancing Selenium Webdriver
framework in 6 months in 2013.
Automation Dave left
It was too difficult for anyone without years of C# dev experience to
maintain
It stopped being of value
10. Adventures in Automation
Jet2 Test Automation part 3.
3 of us went to the National Software Testing Conference in spring 2014
We heard lots of people talking about eggPlant
We tried it.
We liked it.
We bought it.
We increased headcount in order to take our own testers away from
their day job to write the automation packs
We’ve pretty much covered off Jet2holidays now and will start off on
Jet2.com in the next couple of months
11. Lessons Learnt from Adventures in Automation
Pick the right tool for your organisation
Focus on how you will maintain tests once in place
Find the time to allow team members to concentrate 100% on automation
Make sure the people that look after environments know what you’ll be
expecting of them
Try to automate everything but don’t be upset when you realise you can’t
Other teams will tell you how it should work. Listen to what they say, but
remember you are the test professionals and the objective of the exercise is to
save time in your area
Mention lack of time to go to all test related meetings across the 6 scrum teams
Mention lack of direction to hand down to team – I’ll throw some stuff in now and again
Any movie buffs out there?
Refer to the Matrix Reloaded when the architect tells Neo that this is the 6th iteration of the Matrix. We’re on the 3rd test automation platform at Jet2.
Eggplant worked for us as our existing manual testers could become proficient without much training. It also meant we could have an intern working on the project as the barrier to entry was so low that she could join the team and start devving the same day
Automation Dave was great – but he was so technical no-one outside of dev could