The Whole Team Approach to Quality in Continuous Deliverylisacrispin
Lisa shares her teams' experiences with making a team commitment to quality and learning ways to build it in and fit all testing activities into continuous delivery.
Get testing bottlenecks out of your pipelineslisacrispin
When teams move towards continuous delivery and deployment, how do they manage the manual stages in their deployment pipeline? This talk gives some techniques to visualize pipelines, identify bottlenecks, find ways to remove them.
If you’ve shifted left and right so many times, I imagine it’s hard to remember where you started from? The direction of shift was always within a Test Managers gift, but wasn’t obvious. It’s time to shift towards testability.
Ash Winter, Principal Test Engineer at Sky Betting & Gaming covers the following:
⦁ examples of the benefits of an enhanced testability focus
⦁ how focusing on testability can keep Test Managers relevant in changing times
⦁ introduction of a holistic model of testability to expand thinking
⦁ brainstorming – how can test leaders contribute to a testability culture?
Ash said:
“I believe that testability and organisational success are linked. Testable systems are easier to support and maintain. Being able to observe and control systems is a unifying force across disciplines. Why would one not wish to focus on such benefits?"
TestBoss is an award winning invitation-only networking event for leaders in Test Management, hosted by IT recruitment specialist Corecom Consulting.
Why You Don't Want to be a Tester; an agile discussionBrett Tramposh
"Why You Don't Want to be a Tester" focuses on a common discussion we are having among Quality Assurance and Software Testing professionals, especially as it relates to operating as part of an agile team.
In a recent discussion at the Software QA User Group in Portland Oregon, Brett used these slides to foster conversation and to promote the idea that each person should be proactive in their approach to not allow their role to simply become a tester. Solid QA practices are needed more today than ever as we move fast and raise the bar on quality and continually add to our tool belt!
Want more? Visit our official blog, QALounge.com! Brought to you by QASource.com.
To keep up with the rapid pace of release schedules and high customer expectations, many QA teams are transitioning to Agile methodology. In this deck, we review 7 tips to help your team collaborate with dev efficiently and produce a high-quality product.
The Whole Team Approach to Quality in Continuous Deliverylisacrispin
Lisa shares her teams' experiences with making a team commitment to quality and learning ways to build it in and fit all testing activities into continuous delivery.
Get testing bottlenecks out of your pipelineslisacrispin
When teams move towards continuous delivery and deployment, how do they manage the manual stages in their deployment pipeline? This talk gives some techniques to visualize pipelines, identify bottlenecks, find ways to remove them.
If you’ve shifted left and right so many times, I imagine it’s hard to remember where you started from? The direction of shift was always within a Test Managers gift, but wasn’t obvious. It’s time to shift towards testability.
Ash Winter, Principal Test Engineer at Sky Betting & Gaming covers the following:
⦁ examples of the benefits of an enhanced testability focus
⦁ how focusing on testability can keep Test Managers relevant in changing times
⦁ introduction of a holistic model of testability to expand thinking
⦁ brainstorming – how can test leaders contribute to a testability culture?
Ash said:
“I believe that testability and organisational success are linked. Testable systems are easier to support and maintain. Being able to observe and control systems is a unifying force across disciplines. Why would one not wish to focus on such benefits?"
TestBoss is an award winning invitation-only networking event for leaders in Test Management, hosted by IT recruitment specialist Corecom Consulting.
Why You Don't Want to be a Tester; an agile discussionBrett Tramposh
"Why You Don't Want to be a Tester" focuses on a common discussion we are having among Quality Assurance and Software Testing professionals, especially as it relates to operating as part of an agile team.
In a recent discussion at the Software QA User Group in Portland Oregon, Brett used these slides to foster conversation and to promote the idea that each person should be proactive in their approach to not allow their role to simply become a tester. Solid QA practices are needed more today than ever as we move fast and raise the bar on quality and continually add to our tool belt!
Want more? Visit our official blog, QALounge.com! Brought to you by QASource.com.
To keep up with the rapid pace of release schedules and high customer expectations, many QA teams are transitioning to Agile methodology. In this deck, we review 7 tips to help your team collaborate with dev efficiently and produce a high-quality product.
Behave automatically: (Almost) Effortless feature testingSTX Next
Presentation from the 2nd STX Next Summit 2016 by Tomasz Muszczek & Piotr Błaszczyk on how to set up the optimal software testing environment.
https://stxnext.com
We've come to realize that automation provides an immense amount of value in preventing regressions and helping to deliver quality software. As your automation grows and grows, it requires continuous maintenance so that tests remain fast, reliable, and valuable. If you're not scaling efficiently, your automation suite will turn into a messy, uncontrollable beast. Having a lean test suite will help to combat this.
This presentation shares methods that you can use to keep your automated test suites lean and mean, so they always provide quick and accurate feedback to your software delivery team.
Flow From Blockers: How to Use Blocker Clustering to Improve Predictability, ...Matthew Philip
"Flow From Blockers: How to Use Blocker Clustering to Improve Predictability" presentation as given at the Agile Lean Europe 2015 Conference in Sofia, Bulgaria, 28 August 2015.
Lightning talks on best practices for product and engineering teams to experiment everywhere in their applications.
First presented at Optimizely's user conference, Opticon18 on September 12th, 2018.
How to reduce product release cycles down to 4 weeks – Youssif AsfourAgile Tour Beirut
At one company, we were asked to re-architect our business and operations support system to invoice clients “in advance” instead of “in the arrears” – and we succeed in doing that – despite the complexity of the business – in less than four weeks. At another software company, we were able to reduce the product release cycle from 2 years down to 4 weeks. In this talk, I will share the “tricks” and techniques we used to create an agile environment – people, process and systems – to deliver high quality products in 4 week cycles
State transition workshop sigist sept 2017 sue a isabel e v3Isabel Evans
Focus on state transition testing – a way to model your testing world! by Sue Atkins and Isabel Evans.
Test design is a fundamental part of our toolbox as testers, whether we are working with exploratory approaches, designing scripts to be built into automation or carrying out manual scripted testing. As part of the September SIGiST theme of “Increasing our capabilities” we are delighted to offer this masterclass workshop focused on one important test design technique: State Transition Testing.
State transition modelling and testing is useful for understanding diverse types of application and events, such as movement between screens in an application, navigation around websites, and triggers for action in embedded systems.
In 90 minutes, Sue and Isabel will introduce the State Transition technique, show examples and provide you with exercises to try it for yourself. We both use this technique in our own testing, finding it can be applied to
- Review specifications and find potential defects and missing requirements;
- Derive a test basis from discussion of unwritten requirements and designs;
- Derive tests and expected results;
- Drive the direction for a non-scripted approach to test execution;
- Provide input to automated tests.
The workshop will include taught elements, exercises and discussion.
Automated Agility?! Let's Talk Truly Agile Testing - Adam Howard - AgileNZ 2017AgileNZ Conference
The move towards agility is an acceptance that we operate in an uncertain world. We can’t predict what will change in the future so we’ve evolved our practices toward flexibility, instead of attempting precognition. But have we evolved every practice?
About Adam Howard:
Adam Howard is the Test Practice Manager at Trade Me in Wellington, New Zealand. He is passionate about helping to evolve the way testing is perceived and performed. A regular speaker at Meetups and conferences in NZ and internationally, Adam also helps organise local WeTest Workshops and is chief design and layout editor for Testing Trapeze, a bi-monthly testing magazine. He also writes about testing on his blog and occasionally manages to be concise enough to tweet as @adammhoward.
Wenn KI die Zukunft des Testens ist, dann zeige ich Ihnen wie. Es gibt unzählige Automatisierungstools, aber dank hoher Erstellungs- und Wartungsaufwände ist GUI-basiertes Testen immer noch eine mehrheitlich manuelle Aufgabe (entsprechend der Testpyramide). Dabei macht Testen mittlerweile 30% des Gesamtaufwandes eines Softwareprojektes aus! Da ein Fehler im Auge des Betrachters liegt, ist es für eine KI schwer einen Fehler als solchen zu erkennen. Deshalb kann KI heute noch keine Tests automatisieren. Aber was, wenn es eine Möglichkeit gäbe dieses Problem zu umgehen? Ich zeige Ihnen, wie man heute eine KI trainieren und nutzen kann, um nicht nur technische Fehler zu finden, sonder automatisch Tests zu automatisieren! Besuchen Sie die Zukunft des Testens, und sehen Sie wie KI uns helfen kann Software besser zu machen.
The Risk Questionnaire - by: Adam KnightPractiTest
Adam Knight, Head of Product and Testing for River Specializing in custom business intelligence and employee engagement systems, presents "The Risk Questionnaire" at www.OnlineTestConf.com
Behave automatically: (Almost) Effortless feature testingSTX Next
Presentation from the 2nd STX Next Summit 2016 by Tomasz Muszczek & Piotr Błaszczyk on how to set up the optimal software testing environment.
https://stxnext.com
We've come to realize that automation provides an immense amount of value in preventing regressions and helping to deliver quality software. As your automation grows and grows, it requires continuous maintenance so that tests remain fast, reliable, and valuable. If you're not scaling efficiently, your automation suite will turn into a messy, uncontrollable beast. Having a lean test suite will help to combat this.
This presentation shares methods that you can use to keep your automated test suites lean and mean, so they always provide quick and accurate feedback to your software delivery team.
Flow From Blockers: How to Use Blocker Clustering to Improve Predictability, ...Matthew Philip
"Flow From Blockers: How to Use Blocker Clustering to Improve Predictability" presentation as given at the Agile Lean Europe 2015 Conference in Sofia, Bulgaria, 28 August 2015.
Lightning talks on best practices for product and engineering teams to experiment everywhere in their applications.
First presented at Optimizely's user conference, Opticon18 on September 12th, 2018.
How to reduce product release cycles down to 4 weeks – Youssif AsfourAgile Tour Beirut
At one company, we were asked to re-architect our business and operations support system to invoice clients “in advance” instead of “in the arrears” – and we succeed in doing that – despite the complexity of the business – in less than four weeks. At another software company, we were able to reduce the product release cycle from 2 years down to 4 weeks. In this talk, I will share the “tricks” and techniques we used to create an agile environment – people, process and systems – to deliver high quality products in 4 week cycles
State transition workshop sigist sept 2017 sue a isabel e v3Isabel Evans
Focus on state transition testing – a way to model your testing world! by Sue Atkins and Isabel Evans.
Test design is a fundamental part of our toolbox as testers, whether we are working with exploratory approaches, designing scripts to be built into automation or carrying out manual scripted testing. As part of the September SIGiST theme of “Increasing our capabilities” we are delighted to offer this masterclass workshop focused on one important test design technique: State Transition Testing.
State transition modelling and testing is useful for understanding diverse types of application and events, such as movement between screens in an application, navigation around websites, and triggers for action in embedded systems.
In 90 minutes, Sue and Isabel will introduce the State Transition technique, show examples and provide you with exercises to try it for yourself. We both use this technique in our own testing, finding it can be applied to
- Review specifications and find potential defects and missing requirements;
- Derive a test basis from discussion of unwritten requirements and designs;
- Derive tests and expected results;
- Drive the direction for a non-scripted approach to test execution;
- Provide input to automated tests.
The workshop will include taught elements, exercises and discussion.
Automated Agility?! Let's Talk Truly Agile Testing - Adam Howard - AgileNZ 2017AgileNZ Conference
The move towards agility is an acceptance that we operate in an uncertain world. We can’t predict what will change in the future so we’ve evolved our practices toward flexibility, instead of attempting precognition. But have we evolved every practice?
About Adam Howard:
Adam Howard is the Test Practice Manager at Trade Me in Wellington, New Zealand. He is passionate about helping to evolve the way testing is perceived and performed. A regular speaker at Meetups and conferences in NZ and internationally, Adam also helps organise local WeTest Workshops and is chief design and layout editor for Testing Trapeze, a bi-monthly testing magazine. He also writes about testing on his blog and occasionally manages to be concise enough to tweet as @adammhoward.
Wenn KI die Zukunft des Testens ist, dann zeige ich Ihnen wie. Es gibt unzählige Automatisierungstools, aber dank hoher Erstellungs- und Wartungsaufwände ist GUI-basiertes Testen immer noch eine mehrheitlich manuelle Aufgabe (entsprechend der Testpyramide). Dabei macht Testen mittlerweile 30% des Gesamtaufwandes eines Softwareprojektes aus! Da ein Fehler im Auge des Betrachters liegt, ist es für eine KI schwer einen Fehler als solchen zu erkennen. Deshalb kann KI heute noch keine Tests automatisieren. Aber was, wenn es eine Möglichkeit gäbe dieses Problem zu umgehen? Ich zeige Ihnen, wie man heute eine KI trainieren und nutzen kann, um nicht nur technische Fehler zu finden, sonder automatisch Tests zu automatisieren! Besuchen Sie die Zukunft des Testens, und sehen Sie wie KI uns helfen kann Software besser zu machen.
The Risk Questionnaire - by: Adam KnightPractiTest
Adam Knight, Head of Product and Testing for River Specializing in custom business intelligence and employee engagement systems, presents "The Risk Questionnaire" at www.OnlineTestConf.com
Test beyond the obvious- Root Cause AnalysisPractiTest
Kevin Wilkes - Senior Test Consultant at QualiTest and Richard Morgan - UK Delivery Manager at QualiTest, Co-present "Test beyond the obvious- Root Cause Analysis" at OnlineTestConf.com
Rob lambert10 Behaviors of Effective Employees" at OnlineTestConf.PractiTest
Rob lambert - HR VP of Engagement and Enablement at NewVoiceMedia keynote session on "10 Behaviors of Effective Employees" at OnlineTestConf.
www.onlinetestconf.com
Test automation has many advantages. It is a useful but imperfect practice with limitations that are hard to anticipate in a new project. There are many questions that teams find themselves asking throughout a project’s lifecycle:
- How do I get started?
- What should I automate?
- How do I collect the data?
- How do I run my tests when no one is around?
- Do I always need to run all of my tests?
- Do I need to keep my tests forever?
- Where does automation fit in the cadence of the team?
In this session we’ll discuss these question and some additional practical lessons learned from several years of building solutions that leverage test automation in both large and small environments.
Test automation has many advantages. It is a useful but imperfect practice with limitations that are hard to anticipate in a new project. There are many questions that teams find themselves asking throughout a project’s lifecycle:
How do I get started?
What should I automate?
How do I collect the data?
How do I run my tests when no one is around?
Do I always need to run all of my tests?
Do I need to keep my tests forever?
Where does automation fit in the cadence of the team?
In this session we’ll discuss these question and some additional practical lessons learned from several years of building solutions that leverage test automation in both large and small environments.
Measuring your way_to_successful_automation_webinarSauce Labs
Developing a set of metrics is the first step to make in your transition to automation. A quantitative goal will help convince your boss what you need now and help you measure improvement over time.
In this Webinar, Rajeev Rai, the CEO of QASource, who has over 25 years of experience in QA and is a veteran at creating and managing high quality teams, will discuss metrics that helped him overcome challenges to drive automation success.
Learn how to navigate organizational culture to change views toward Quality and Scrum
Testing as part of a Scrum team (Everyone owns quality!)
Ways to "write tests" without breaking the time-bank
Set yourself up for success, even without automation
(Automation is awesome, and you should use it if you have it, but it's not 100% required to succeed at Scrum.)
Lean software engineering emphasizes continuous delivery of high quality applications. Ken Pugh explains the principles and practices that form the basis of lean software development―concentrating on developing a continuous flow by eliminating delays and loopbacks; delivering quickly by developing in small batches; emphasizing high quality which decreases delays due to defect repair; making policies, process and progress transparent; optimizing the whole rather than individual steps; and becoming more efficient by decreasing waste. Ken describes lean’s emphasis on cycle time, rather than resource utilization, and demonstrates the value stream map which helps you visualize the development cycle flow to identify bottlenecks. He explores the differences between push and pull flow, describes how lean thinking shows up in agile processes including Scrum and Extreme Programming, and discusses how lean can be applied to the entire workflow—not just the development portion. Ken concludes with a discussion of how you can begin your lean transformation.
Shift left, shift right the testing swing.
This deck shows the testing framework we use today in our agile & Devops team. We do Behavior Driven Development (Shift left) and test in production as well (shift right).
Aubrey Smith, Sparked Advisory
In this training, we will build on the foundation established in Lean Startup 101 and 201 by delving into examples and cases of the Lean Startup concepts in action. Attendees of Lean Startup 301 will be exposed to cutting edge work from thought leaders and experts using Lean Startup in practice today — at startups and within the enterprise. Participation in this session is essential: You will be asked to help design an MVP and experiment to test critical Leap of Faith Assumption(s) in groups and will be encourage to share experiences. The session is designed to allow attendees to stretch their skills and to push one-another to ‘learn by doing’. The session will also include:
Sample cases and live interviews with practitioners highlighting the application of core concepts;
Exercises designed to bring the concepts to life and challenge participants to deepen their skills;
Discussion of advanced topics such organizational culture and governance as well as industry-specific concepts such as using Lean Startup in heavily regulated markets.
Thanks to Lean Startup Co.’s law firm, Orrick, for being the sponsor for this track.
[Webinar] Test First, Fail Fast - Simplifying the Tester's Transition to DevOpsKMS Technology
DevOps is a spectacular mish-mash of development and operations processes and practices that has been growing increasingly popular in recent years. With the upward trending rate in adoption comes the need for organizations to fully understand the key practices as well as thoroughly integrating team members, especially testers, throughout the delivery pipeline. Getting started with DevOps practices can be a little tricky when choosing the right tools, people, and processes. In this webinar, we’ll focus on helping you make the switch without diminishing the team’s delivered product quality, so that the transition meets the enterprise objectives of speed and reliability.
Tune in to learn:
The biggest concern when moving to DevOps - and how to handle it
Why you need ‘Coding Testers’
The best tools for the job
The process of failing fast, and its significance to testers
Measuring the transition - recommended metrics
The value of DevOps long-term - efficiency, repeatability & reliability
Don’t worry about failing - it’s a part of the process!
Lean software development has been described as “better, faster, cheaper” and focused on “eliminating waste,” but those are misnomers. Going after speed improvement and waste elimination can actually reduce the benefits you might otherwise get from lean. Ken Pugh describes what lean software development really is and why you should be incorporating it into your development efforts—whether you use Scrum, kanban, or SAFe. Ken explains the mindset, principles, and practices of lean. Its foundations are systems thinking, a relentless focus on time, and an understanding that complex systems require holistic solutions. Employing lean principles, you optimize the whole, eliminate delays, improve collaboration, deliver value quickly, create effective ecosystems for development, push decisions to the people doing the work, and build integrity in. Lean practices include small batches, cross-functional teams, implementing pull, and managing work in process. Join Ken to learn how to use lean—no matter where you are in your development process.
The Push From Within - A Journey of Transformation at Walmart Labs by Claude ...Sauce Labs
Claude Jones, Sr. Director of Engineering at Walmart Labs, provides an inside look of what it took to push from within and help one of the world’s largest companies adopt a culture of quality. His presentation covers identifying the right project, building the right team structure, removing the fear of change, providing value with the right metrics, making testing fun and reinforcing the benefits. This case study will challenge you to re-think your approach or empower you to stay on your current path of adopting a culture of quality.
Engineering leaders from eBay and Walmart discuss how they tackle test automation, testing data, accessibility and other areas within their departments.
Continuous Testing: Preparing for DevOpsSTePINForum
by Ingo Philipp, Distinguished Evangelist, Tricentis at STeP-IN SUMMIT 2018 - 15th International Conference on Software Testing on August 30, 2018 at Taj, MG Road, Bengaluru
uCertify invites the first 100 customers to begin feasting early! Buy 3 or more Prepkits
and get 40% OFF! The best part of this sale is that you won’t regret feasting. You will
pass in your first attempt or your money back.
Continuous testing maximising velocity, quality and customer happinessPractiTest
Organizations turn to Agile and DevOps to increase value and improve the customer experience by maximizing the speed of delivery without sacrificing quality. As the champions of quality, testers achieve this goal through continuous testing. But just what is continuous testing?
Spring OnlineTestConf 2018 session by Gerie Owen - VP Knowledge & Innovation--US at QualiTest Group
Karishma Kolli – Myth Busters on Test AutomationPractiTest
Slides from Karishma Kolli's Fall OnlineTestConf session – Myth Busters on Test Automation
There is a misconception in software world about automation testing that it is a “Magic wand that takes care of all your testing needs” but in reality it is NOT.
Test automation is at times mistaken to be the be-all and end-all testing solution. Why can’t it take care of all our needs? How and when should I choose automation? What’s my developer’s role in test automation? How much of ROI will I have with test automation? How can I get the best of both worlds(Manual and automation)?
These questions and more were addressed in this OnlineTestConf session.
For recording visit: www.onlinetestconf.com
Slides from Janet Aponte-Pagan's 2017 Fall OnlineTestConf session – Mind maps can save your sanity!
Using Mindmaps to visually layout user stories or requirements to gain a better understanding of the overall project.
Main Takeaways: Converting user stories/requirements into a meaningful diagram that can be used to:
– Create a high level test approach
– identify potential risk items
– identify minimal essential testing
– Develop a test coverage matrix
– Identify specific features/functionality
For more visit: www.onlinetestconf.com
The New Normal for Development and Testing in Agile and DevOpsPractiTest
Slides from Michael Sowers's 2017 Fall OnlineTestConf session – The New Normal for Development and Testing in Agile and DevOps.
Software development and testing are getting more challenging because of the tremendous complexity we face At the same time, agile, DevOps and other adaptive approaches allow us to innovate faster and deliver improvements, almost continuously.
For development and testing, this means more change, less certainty, even shorter development and testing windows, a constant flow of new functionality to deploy, and the lingering risk of major or catastrophic failures.
This presentation will highlight some of the characteristics of the New Normal in Development & Testing such as data analytics, TestDev thinking, continuous everything, pervasive automation and near real-time metrics and others. The audience will leave with renewed perspectives and ideas on how to better equip themselves to embrace this new normal.
For more: www.onlinetestconf.com
Slides from Jesper Ottosen's 2017 Fall OnlineTestConf session – Shifting is more than shift left.
Change is happening to the testing activities. Shift-left automates and codifies the testing activities. Shift-right does it for production.
This session was about a couple of other trends, changes, and shifts that are happening to testers and test managers.
– Shift-Coach, where It’s more about coaching teams.
– Shift-SME, where it’s more about business savvy.
– Shift-Deliver, where it’s more about the road to production
www.onlinetestconf.com
Slides from Joel Montveliksy's 2017 Fall OnlineTestConf session – Testing in the future. Today.
Word in the street is that Testing is changing.
You know what? Testing has already changed! But the truth is that even with all these aggressive changes taking place in our working environment, there is a lot about the core values of testing that still remains relevant.
In this session Joel will go over the changes taking place in the testing world, the core values that are still relevant today in testing just as there were 10 and 20 years ago, and how to develop an approach to continue being relevant as testers in the years to come.
For more visit: www.onlinetestconf.com
By: ADISA SINANOVIC, QA engineer at Comtrade & AMELA TEFTEDARIJA, Lead QA engineer in Comtrade.
As presented at Spring OnlineTestConf, June13-14, 2017
www.onlinetestconf.com
We all know that the tester’s role on the agile projects is not the same as the one on a traditional waterfall’s. But what values do testers now add to the agile teams? What are the most commonly encountered challenges that the testers nowadays face? Do they need to know how to write a code? Is automated testing really the key solution to all these issues? We’ll try to answer these and (of course) some of your questions at this session and explore some real case examples from our international projects and our testing community.
We would like to help testers to find the needed power to understand their real values and principles that support the agile projects and let them become aware that they are also an important part of a whole-team approach, together with the developers and the business representatives.
Presentation Takeaways:
1. How to overcome some of the challenges that testers face working in agile teams.
2. What values testers need to embrace and add to agile teams.
3. How to bridge over barriers between traditional and agile testing
By: QualiTest CEO Ayal Zylberman
As presented at Spring OnlineTestConf June13-14, 2017
www.onlinetestconf.com
Join QualiTest CEO Ayal Zylberman for a session to learn about Artificial Intelligence and how it relates to testing. We have all talked about the future and the possibility of machines replacing humans in decision-making. According to McKinsey, 60% of all occupations could see 30% or more of their constituent activities automated. Therefore we must ask ourselves how it will impact our job as testers. What testing aspects can already be automated or will soon be automated, and what parts of a tester's job benefit from the human advantage?
10+ Testing Pitfalls and How to Avoid them PractiTest
Join Joel Montvelisky, PractiTest's chief solution architect in this webinar as he takes you through the common pitfalls of testing you need to be aware of and how to avoid them.
A good tester uses communication not only to 'let others know', but also to get the information they need. An even greater tester knows how to use communication as part of their actual testing, to focus their process and achieve better results.
In this Webinar we will go over all the advanced aspects of communication and how to leverage them as part of your testing:
- The communication process in testing - a 360 Degree view.
- How to leverage communication as an ongoing part of your process.
- Tips and tricks on how to communicate effectively with your project stakeholders.
- Risks you'll encounter while throughout software development and testing.
- Cataloguing and managing you risks
- Adding value to your QA by managing your risks.
Full webinar recording:
https://www.practitest.com/qa-learningcenter/webinars/testing-risk-management-webinar/
-Agile development and Agile testing.
-The aim of test management in Agile projects
- Tips and ideas for successfully managing your Agile testing process.
full webinar recording:
https://www.practitest.com/qa-learningcenter/webinars/agile-test-management/
Find out:
- what is a master test plan
- common parts of a master test plan
-master test plan in an Agile age
Full webinar recording video:
https://www.practitest.com/qa-learningcenter/webinars/master-test-plan-webinar/
Mixing testing types to improve your testing resultsPractiTest
How to mix different testing types to optimize your testing results.
Test type classifications and examples of "mix and match" practices.
Full webinar recording can be viewed here:
https://www.practitest.com/qa-learningcenter/webinars/mixing-testing-types-to-improve-your-work/
Why can't programmers test and what can you do about it?
Do your developers take part in testing tasks?
Fact! [Most] developers are not good testers.
So how can we help then out?
Full webinar recording here:
https://www.practitest.com/qa-learningcenter/webinars/developer-testing-webinar/
Introduction to Agile development and Agile testing
The main challenges and tips for a successful Agile Test Management process.
For other webinars about testing visit:
https://www.practitest.com/qa-learningcenter/#webinars
How to avoid cutting yourself with the double edged sword of Testing Metrics.
- Pros and cons of working with metrics
- Plan a metrics program
- Tips and tricks of working with metrics.
For full webinar recording:
https://www.practitest.com/qa-learningcenter/webinars/testing-metrics/
Check out the webinar slides to learn more about how XfilesPro transforms Salesforce document management by leveraging its world-class applications. For more details, please connect with sales@xfilespro.com
If you want to watch the on-demand webinar, please click here: https://www.xfilespro.com/webinars/salesforce-document-management-2-0-smarter-faster-better/
Climate Science Flows: Enabling Petabyte-Scale Climate Analysis with the Eart...Globus
The Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) is a global network of data servers that archives and distributes the planet’s largest collection of Earth system model output for thousands of climate and environmental scientists worldwide. Many of these petabyte-scale data archives are located in proximity to large high-performance computing (HPC) or cloud computing resources, but the primary workflow for data users consists of transferring data, and applying computations on a different system. As a part of the ESGF 2.0 US project (funded by the United States Department of Energy Office of Science), we developed pre-defined data workflows, which can be run on-demand, capable of applying many data reduction and data analysis to the large ESGF data archives, transferring only the resultant analysis (ex. visualizations, smaller data files). In this talk, we will showcase a few of these workflows, highlighting how Globus Flows can be used for petabyte-scale climate analysis.
Globus Compute wth IRI Workflows - GlobusWorld 2024Globus
As part of the DOE Integrated Research Infrastructure (IRI) program, NERSC at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and ALCF at Argonne National Lab are working closely with General Atomics on accelerating the computing requirements of the DIII-D experiment. As part of the work the team is investigating ways to speedup the time to solution for many different parts of the DIII-D workflow including how they run jobs on HPC systems. One of these routes is looking at Globus Compute as a way to replace the current method for managing tasks and we describe a brief proof of concept showing how Globus Compute could help to schedule jobs and be a tool to connect compute at different facilities.
Software Engineering, Software Consulting, Tech Lead.
Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, Spring Core, Spring JDBC, Spring Security,
Spring Transaction, Spring MVC,
Log4j, REST/SOAP WEB-SERVICES.
Cyaniclab : Software Development Agency Portfolio.pdfCyanic lab
CyanicLab, an offshore custom software development company based in Sweden,India, Finland, is your go-to partner for startup development and innovative web design solutions. Our expert team specializes in crafting cutting-edge software tailored to meet the unique needs of startups and established enterprises alike. From conceptualization to execution, we offer comprehensive services including web and mobile app development, UI/UX design, and ongoing software maintenance. Ready to elevate your business? Contact CyanicLab today and let us propel your vision to success with our top-notch IT solutions.
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46. 1. Don’t dive in head first
2. Don’t automate everything
3. It’s not the end of manual testing
4. Set realistic expectations for management
5. Be collaborative
5 Tips for succeeding with
automated testing
Welcome everyone to “Automation is not the answer… unless you want it to be”...
The goal of this session will be to give you a high level view of automated testing and explain why most people abandon it, and give some tips for those who don’t so that you too can be utilizing automation to it’s fullest potential
As Joel mentioned, I am Mike Sparks, I am the qa architect at Grant Street Group and also the product lead on a testing application known as Tellurium.
Over the past few years I’ve assisted a number of companies with their automated testing efforts, and I’ve included a number of the lessons learned in this talk.
In a shocking twist of events, I’m actually going to start by talking about how great automated testing is.
But Mike, doesn’t the title say that automated testing is NOT the solution? Yes, bare with me, we’ll get there.
Let’s start with a story:
This was me, 8 years ago. Not the kid or the cat, the other guy.
Doesn’t FEEL that long ago, but sadly it was.
I was asked to start up a QA department for the company that I worked for. Neither they nor I knew anything about QA, so I said “what the heck?”
As I started researching testing as part of QA in general I stumbled upon the mythical being known as
“automated testing”.
Now at this point I was an army of 1 trying to assemble test plans and get help wherever I could find it to test this massively complex system. Here comes “automated testing” and it sounded like it was going to be the magical elixir that would take one of me, and make multiples of me that could help me accomplish all of the testing that needed to happen.
Specifically automated testing promised 3 main advantages…
Saves time
You can get a machine to do automatically what you’ve been doing manually, duh.
Allows you to increase your test coverage
If I have automated tests for this stuff over here, then I no longer need to do it manually. Therefore we can focus on these other areas.
Instills confidence in your releases
More tests mean that we know that more of our application is working, which means we feel better about pushing out changes. Huzzah!
You can do things like automated regression testing, automated smoke testing, automated load testing, automated stress testing, automated spike testing, and the list goes on and on.
All three of these things are great and extremely good selling points for automated testing, and to be honest are all true.
Today we have a team of people managing thousands of tests that are all running automatically, catching bugs early in the development process, and everything is great.
BUT….
… there is a big gap between what happened 8 years ago and today. How we got from there to here made us go down paths that we never thought we’d need to travel based on those initial 3 selling points.
It’s been my experience, working with tons of different companies, that that path can lead you to either great success, OR massive time loss and ultimately failure.
So that’s why the title of this discussion is “Automated testing is NOT the answer” because for most people and companies it’s not.
BUT, there is hope...
“... unless you want it to be.” It all comes down to how badly you and your company WANT it.
If you think it’s going to be easy, it’s not. If you think it’s going to save you time, it won’t (at least not until you reach a certain threshold).
Right now you’re thinking “Jeeze Mike, you’re really convincing me that I want to do this.” I know.
Fear not. I am here to help fill in the gap, let you know that you aren’t alone in all of this, tons of other people just like you have gone through this process and come through the other end with something that works for them. And today I’m going to give you the real reason why you shouldn’t trust the initial pitch of automation, and knowing the TRUTH will help you make a better decision about using it as a tool in your arsenal.
Let’s sidestep the hype and start with the truth about these 3 selling points. After that, after you’ve distilled that truth and determined that automated testing is still for you, then I’ll give you some tips and tricks for crossing that chasm and making it to the automated testing holy land.
The Truth
Saves time
Yes, in the LONG term automated tests will save you time. But not YOUR personal time.
What you end up saving is what I call “theoretical time”. You’ll end up with tests that run for thousands of hours/month, which you can equate to management as “our automated tests run for 3,000 hours which is the equivalent of 15 people you didn’t have to pay!”
That’s great, but in all likelihood management wasn’t going to hire 15 more people to do all of that manual testing anyway. It’s testing that otherwise just wouldn’t have gotten done if you didn’t have automated testing.
But what about the argument that “If I automate all of the stuff I do manually now, then that’s less time I need to spend manually testing.”?
In reality, most individual testers get into automated testing to replace the work their doing now so that they can focus on other things. The thought is that automated testing will make you more efficient and save you time and unfortunately that’s not the case.
Someone needs to spend time creating all of those tests, maintaining all of those tests, running all of those tests, reviewing the results of those tests, checking for false failures, and reporting the findings.
These aren’t negligible tasks, they all take time and resources to complete.
Even one automated test adds overhead to your testing process.
Not to mention that not all of your tests will likely be automatable.
One of the unique things about testing is that no two companies really do it the same because no two companies are building the exact same applications in the exact same way. Therefore, there is no be-all-end-all automated testing tool that’s going to allow you to test 100% of the things you want to test. Especially if you’re trying to use something like a record/playback tool.
Regardless, it’s been my experience that people DRASTICALLY underestimate the time it takes to create, manage, maintain, run, and report on their automated tests.
Not to mention that if your app changes, you need to go and fix all of your tests.
Again, this isn’t as big of a problem long term, but it’s a trap that many testers new to automation fall into. “I can do this in conjunction with my manual testing and still handle everything myself”
Unfortunately there just aren’t enough hours in the day, and most people learn this after it’s too late and get discouraged.
Don’t get discouraged, now you know.
The benefits long term are massive if you can get over this hurdle, you just need to understand and persevere.
So will automated testing save you time? Yes, long term. But immediately it’ll add more work, much more work to your existing testing efforts.
Next up, Automated testing allows you to increase your test coverage
Yes, automated testing does allow you to increase your test coverage… a lot. But it takes time, a lot, to create all of those tests.
Our current test suite saves us over 5,000 hours of testing each month. That’s the equivalent of 25 full-time testers doing nothing but testing every hour of every workday.
It’s a substantial amount of testing, and something that our company greatly values.
But if you’re trying to do it solo while also doing manual functional testing, manual regression testing, and all of the other things that testers are used to doing, then you’re never going to get to the point where you have a large enough library that you’re likely hoping to get to someday.
In most cases, people starting in automation actually spend MORE time testing just to keep up! Notice the “-5 hours”. That’s being generous, it’s likely much worse than that.
To get past this, you’ll likely need to either focus on automated testing full time, or hire someone else to focus on it full time while you continue to do your current tasks.
You CAN get there, it’s just never as easy as it seems on the surface. You need to set realistic expectations, which we’ll talk about in a minute.
So, can you increase your test coverage with automated testing? Absolutely. But are you going to see substantial changes in the first few weeks, months, or year if you’re attempting it on your own? Probably not.
Finally we have “Instills confidence in your releases”
The idea being, if we have more tests, testing more areas of our application, then we’ll have more confidence that our app is doing what it’s supposed to do.
Yes and no. One big warning, and I’ve seen this in multiple companies, is a false sense of equating pass percentage with app reliability. And this applies to not just automated testing, but manual testing as well.
For example,
Let’s say that Company A and B produce similar applications and each have 3 main features, searching, a shopping cart, and payment processing.
Company A has 100 automated tests that focus on all 3 of those main features.
Company B has 500 automated tests (!) but they only focus on searching and the shopping cart. They have no automated tests for payment processing.
Both Companies run their automated test suites and both come back passing at 100%. Management for both companies may look at that number and feel great, but as a tester, which one do you feel more confident in?
It’s a trick question, one that we can’t answer without knowing more about the tests themselves. What are they doing?
It’s all about context, and doing the work up front to build a test plan that sufficiently covers your application, which you’d want to do regardless of whether you’re doing automation or not.
But the trap that I’ve seen companies fall into is a false sense of app stability. “Our tests are passing at 100%, we’re good”. Not if your tests aren’t covering your entire application, which most automated testing suites don’t. Does 100% give you the warm and fuzzies? Sure. But it also makes people overlook other areas that shouldn’t be overlooked.
Adam talked a bit about this during his Risk session yesterday.
Can you overcome this? Absolutely, by setting expectations early that automated testing is just one part of the larger testing process, and without proper planning could result in a whole lot of tests for one piece of functionality, which may give you confidence in THAT FUNCTIONALITY, but not the application as a whole.
Ok, so we’ve established that all of these points are valid as it relates to automated testing, but none of them are benefits that you’re going to experience right out of the gate. It’s going to take you time and resources to get there.
Hopefully I haven’t scared you half to death. If not, then great, because now I’m going to give you 5 automation secrets so that if mentally you can get past the items above, you can be successful using automation.
#1. Don’t dive in head first.
In this case the fox is actually winning, but the image is too good to pass up.
Most people take on automation and in their pure excitement try to make as many tests as they can. Don’t do that.
Plan, plan, plan.
Identify the most important areas of your application. The ones that would spell doomsday if they failed.
Think about the business processes behind your applications. What are the things that bring your applications to a screeching halt if they weren’t functioning properly.
For example, let’s look at Amazon.
Their top 3 doomsday features might be:
Searching
Adding items to the cart
Checking out.
If any of those three things go down, then Amazon can’t do what Amazon is known for: selling products.
Next, think about what features are used the most often. Sometimes they’ll be the same as your doomsday features, but often times they aren’t.
So for Amazon, we could argue that their most used features are:
Searching
Reading reviews
And viewing more details about the products
Once you have your two lists, you want to compare them to determine what you should prioritize with your testing.
Look for where you have crossover. That’s a good place to start planning your regression testing and figuring out what tests you should start automating first.
But you don’t just need to plan for WHAT you’ll be testing, but also HOW you’ll be testing.
What you don’t want to do is create hundreds of automated tests only to realize you need to go back and recreate them because you didn’t create them in the most efficient way for the long haul.
I’ve worked with more than 1 company that’s happened to, where they’ve had a massive suite of tests but essentially had to spend months starting over to make themselves more agile and more efficient.
Instead you want your tests to be as flexible as possible and share processes as much as possible.
For example, say you have 50 tests and they all start with logging into your application.
Typically testers will just include the steps to login as part of every test.
The problem with that is if the login process ever changes, then you need to update all 50 tests individually, which can take a massive amount of time.
Instead you should use something like a phrase or a subroutine.
A phrase or a subroutine is a small piece of your test whose process is defined outside of your test. For example something like logging in, searching for an account, checking out. These processes all contain repeatable steps that could be used within a multitude of your automated tests.
So let’s look at those same 50 tests, but instead of the login process being written in all of the tests, we save the login process somewhere else as a phrase or subroutine and reference it in our test.
Now if your login process changes, rather than updating all 50 tests, all you have to do is update the phrase or subroutine where you defined the login process and all of your tests will update automatically.
It saves you a MASSIVE amount of time, and writing your tests this way from the start will save you a ton of headaches down the road.
Not using something like phrases or subroutines has lead teams to completely abandon their automated tests and automated testing practices because the work to go back and add them in could seem insurmountable
Using something like phrases or subroutines will help you substantially cut down on how many tests you need to update when a particular process changes.
This is an example of what a login phrase could look like in our automated testing tool, Tellurium.
Things like phrases and subroutines, or even just planning what tests you should automate first are all things that you need to consider BEFORE you start creating your tests since they will save you massive amounts of time long term and could be the difference between automated testing working for you, or not.
#2. Keep calm and Do not automate everything
Some things are much more important to automate than others.
For example, what’s the first test that everyone wants to automate? Logging in.
Sure, go ahead and create a test for logging in if you’re going to use it for smoke testing. But odds are that you’re going to test logging in while you’re in the process of testing other features in your application.
For example:
Say you create an automated test to test logging in.
Now say that you’re manually testing what happens when you search for a specific item within your application.
Odds are, you’re going to have to login in order to manually test that functionality. So you’d manually be duplicating exactly what the automated test is doing.
Not only that, but you’d be maintaining that automated test, you’d be running that automated test, you’d be checking the results, all for a process that you already know is working because of the manual testing you’re doing.
That’s the opposite of what we’re trying to accomplish with automation.
Instead you want to identify the features within your application that are best suited for automation, and which ones you’ll test manually, either intentionally or not.
Don’t do both, you’ll just be making more work for yourself.
Keep in mind, there are some things that you simply will not be able to automate OR they’ll be so difficult to automate and maintain that you’re better off testing it manually.
For example: Say you have an application that prints documents that are then mailed. And say that the document needs to have everything aligned just right otherwise the address won’t appear in the envelope's window.
You COULD build an automated test to check the positioning of the text, but not all automation tools support that.
And even if they do, those can be very complicated tests to try to build and maintain.
Instead, it may be better to consider a different workflow: have your automated test simply print out one of the forms and then have someone manually spot check the print out.
Are you creating additional work for someone? Yes. But is the amount of time required to pickup a form from the printer and verify that everything is aligned LESS than what is required to create, manage, maintain, and review the results of automated test that does the same thing? More than likely, Yes.
If you’re going to be testing it regardless, you want to find the efficiencies in the process and automation is NOT always the most efficient way to test something.
So don’t feel like you need to automate everything, an efficient process purposely balances both manual and automated testing.
And that segways into our next point.
This is from a movie called “Office Space” where they brought in consultants to essentially make everyone in the office justify their continued employment.
Often testers see automated tests as their replacement, and ultimately making themselves obsolete. Not so!
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#3. Automation does NOT mean the end of manual testing
Pixar ran into a lot of opposition early on when they started making computer animated movies.
Until Toy Story, the vast majority of animated moves were produced by traditional animators using pen and paper.
When it was originally introduced, computer animation appeared to be this breakthrough technology that could make more realistic films and cut down on the production time.
But traditional animators saw computer animation as a threat to their jobs, concerned that long term it was going to force them out of work.
What they didn’t realize was that the skills they’d developed related to understanding movement, scale, character design, conveying emotion, focus… all of those things would need to be translated and carried over into computer animation. Their knowledge was and still is crucial to make computer animation successful.
The parallels between animation and automated testing are hard to ignore.
Automation is simply a tool to help testers accomplish what they need to accomplish.
Sure, it’s great. But automated tests can only test exactly what you tell them to test. No more, no less. So they’re only as effective as the people creating the automated tests.
There will always be a need for manually testing a new piece of functionality and the skillset of great testers will always be in demand.
Testers have the experience to know tips and tricks on how to “break” their application, and those tips are sometimes more valuable than the potential for automated testing.
One of the big intangibles that makes testers so valuable is their approach to testing and the testing mentality.
For example, say you’re supposed to test an input field. Most people would just type in that field, submit the form, and say it works.
As we know, Testers look at that field and think things like:
What happens if I DON’T type in that field? Will I get an error message?
What happens if I type an invalid value in that field? Will the form still submit? Will it throw an error message?
And what constitutes an invalid value? If you’re supposed to enter a number between 1 and 100, what happens if you enter a negative number?
We think beyond the obvious because we’re curious and want to uncover what secrets our apps are hiding. That curiosity is something that’s extremely valuable and is something that other employees covet in the changing app development landscape.
Those are all things that you COULD automate, but most people don’t think to. So that experience and knowledge that testers have is valuable in teaching people HOW to test applications.
Considering that apps and app development are constantly changing there will always be manual testing that occurs in some capacity. How large of a tool it will be in your tool belt is up to you.
Tip #4. Set realistic expectations for management
Implementing automation, correctly, is not just an add on for an overworked tester or team. As we’ve discussed, it requires dedicated resources to create, manage, modify, run, and report on the results.
Eventually the time spent by those resources will greatly be dwarfed by the hours of automated testing you’ll be able to accomplish, but that won’t be the case to start.
Don’t oversell what you’ll be able to accomplish with automation in the first few months just because of the long term benefits. Be up front with management, making it clear that it’s going to be slow going and there will be ramp up time to get to the point where you want to be.
It’s like Rob said in yesterday’s keynote, it’s all about communication.
Automation seems like this mystical thing. The less mystical and grounded you can make it with management, the more interested and engaged they’ll be in wanting to see it succeed.
And why is this important? Why do you need management’s buy-in?
Because to really make automation work it’s going to require a change in process, a cultural shift within your company.
It’s very difficult to just “kind of” implement it.
Everyone needs to grab hold and move forward together or it’s not going to stick.
Example of GSG and Tellurium
Tellurium is a testing tool that we developed within the larger company, Grant Street Group.
We built it to help our testing efforts with one specific application within the company. That app was too complex for any other testing tools available, so we had to build something powerful enough to meet our needs.
As other teams and applications heard about what was possible they loved the idea of using Tellurium for their testing as well.
The problem was just that, they everyone loved the IDEA of automated testing. Unfortunately they weren’t willing to change their business processes and put in the time and energy to implement automated testing properly.
Eventually we had to sell the idea to upper management, who then mandated that automated testing be adopted company wide with the understanding that it would require a change in business processes.
As soon as that mandate was passed down everyone took hold and automated testing has become a reliable part of our business processes.
The “A” stands for “Automation”. Most people don’t know that, now you do.
As part of your planning figure out the right number of people you’re going to need to make it work and make that known to management up front.
A good method for this is to show them all of the amazing things that automation can do for you, and then make it clear that you won’t get anywhere near there without X number of people and buy in from the whole company.
The advantages of automation are substantial enough that you’ll at least get SOME consideration, even if they don’t sign off and approve the hiring of all the people you need to implement your grand plan. Baby steps.
If the minimum you can get is a mandate that it be adopted company wide, then you’re headed in the right direction.
If you’re having a hard time getting buy in, try automating just a little bit yourself. You know it won’t be sustainable long term, but if you can show the company results as part of a proof of concept, then you’re more likely to get buy in for the larger cultural shift required to get everyone on board.
Tip #5. Be collaborative
Look how happy they all look...
If you have a testing tool that only you can use then:
A) The onus all falls on you to make it work, and
B) You’re never really going to get buy in from anyone else.
You’ll be the one in the top right, talking about how great automation is, but no one else will care since they really aren’t dealing with it.
This can be a problem since a lot of automated testing tools don’t allow for easy collaboration.
Most have to be installed on just one computer which means that all tests must be created, modified, and run on that one particular machine.
This substantially limits your ability to collaborate and will make it substantially more difficult for you to grow automation within your organization.
Instead what you want is an automation tool that allows developers and testers to work together to build the test suite.
If you only have one person that can work on the tests then they become the stopgap and progress will be slow and can easily be abandoned.
But if you have more people sharing ideas about what tests should be considered, what efficiencies could be gained, and what other resources could be committed to doing something like load testing or spike testing, then your efforts become substantially more valuable more quickly.
Example from GSG:
Once it was mandated that everyone use it, then everyone started asking more questions, sharing ideas, and collaborating on building, running, and maintaining our test suites.
Different people could run the test suite for different purposes, whenever they needed to.
Developers could run the tests as soon as they added their changes to the Test Environment
Dev Ops could run the tests as soon as they did a promotion to make sure the applications were working as expected
Testers could run the tests as part of their overall regression efforts
ITS can use some of the tests to do load and spike testing
And the list goes on and on
We NEVER could have gotten to where we are today if it wasn’t for that collaborative process.
And this isn’t an isolated example. I’ve talked and worked with MANY companies who have had similar experiences
So there you have it, 5 tips for succeeding with automated testing once you truly understand and determine whether it’s right for you in the first place.
[Read through them]
Remember, if you’re just starting out in automation it’s not going to be easy or seem like it’s what you signed up for. But, if you know that going in and follow these 5 tips, then your chances of succeeding will be substantially greater than those who have come before you.
You CAN do it…. If you WANT to.
If you’re looking for automated testing tool for web applications that includes things like phrases and collaboration I’d recommend checking out Tellurium. It’s free, there’s nothing to install, and you’ll learn very quickly whether it’s something that will meet your needs.