Test Automation

Tutorials

TD Get Full Value from Your Automated Tests

Gerard Meszaros, FeedXL.com

Tue, 06/23/2015 - 8:30am

Due to the demands for reduced cycle times, automated tests are considered “table stakes” these days—whether you’re working on agile or waterfall projects. How do you minimize the cost of creating and maintaining—and maximize the value you get from—these automated tests? What kinds of tools should you use to avoid getting mired in test automation rework hell? Gerard Meszaros shares a toolkit of techniques for preparing robust, easily-understood automated tests that also serves as a specification of what should be built. Gerard lays out the key success factors—using different levels of tests, consciously managing the scope of each test and its level of detail, writing tests using business (not technical) terminology, and selecting tools that support this strategy. Exercises give you hands-on experience refactoring tests to make them more readable and maintainable. Gain a valuable appreciation for the kinds of tools you’ll need to prepare tests anyone can read and understand.

TF Tips for Expanding Your Testing Toolbox

Alan Page, Microsoft

Tue, 06/23/2015 - 1:00pm

Regardless of how long you’ve been testing and learning—only a month or many years—there is always something new to help improve your testing and software development efforts. Although many testers, for better or worse, see test automation as their next—and sometimes only—step to grow their skill set and improve as a tester, there is much more to do. Alan Page discusses, demonstrates, and details concepts and tools that can help everyone test better and provide noticeable technical value to their organization. Alan explores a potpourri of suggestions to help you grow your testing toolbox: techniques for security and performance testing, tools to help you find better bugs, scripting that aids (rather than replaces) your testing, tester tips for code review that can be done with minimal (or zero) knowledge of coding, and more. Finally, you’ll learn simple approaches that will enable you to continue to grow your knowledge and skills throughout your career.

TG Getting Things Done: What Testers Do in Agile Sprints

Rob Sabourin, AmiBug.com

Tue, 06/23/2015 - 1:00pm

Avoiding siloed development and test is a tricky business—even with agile practices in place. It is easy for agile teams to fall into the rut in which testers only do testing and programmers only do coding. Rob Sabourin explores many ways to apply your testing knowledge and experience inside a Scrum sprint or iteration and throughout an agile project. He finds that testers are among the most skilled team members in story grooming, elicitation, and exploration. Rob describes a host of ways testers add value to an agile sprint—using their analysis skills to help clear the way to make tough technical trade-offs; pairing with programmers to help design and review unit tests; studying static analysis reports to find unexpected code complexity or security; and much more. Join Rob to see how testers can start working hand-in-hand with developers, business analysts, and product owners to get more things done in agile sprints and projects.

Keynotes

K1 How We NOW Test Software at Microsoft

Alan Page, Microsoft

Wed, 06/24/2015 - 8:30am

In December 2008 when How We Test Software at Microsoft was first published, the software community appreciated the insight into many testing activities and processes popular at Microsoft. Six and a half years later, many companies—including Microsoft—have evolved and changed in a variety of ways, and now much of the book is outdated or obsolete. New products, new ideas, and new strategies for releasing software have emerged. Alan Page explores Microsoft’s current approaches to software testing and quality. He digs into new practices, describes changing roles, rants about long-lived ideas kicked to the curb in the past seven years―and might even share a few tidbits not fit for print and wide-scale distribution. To give organizations food for thought and ideas for growth, Alan reveals what’s new in quality approaches, developer to tester ratios, agile practices, tools, tester responsibilities—and lessons he’s learned along the way.

Concurrent Sessions

W2 Testing the Internet of Things

Regg Struyk, Polarion Software

Wed, 06/24/2015 - 10:15am

Embedded software—now being referred to as the Internet of Things (IoT)—continues to permeate almost every industry—from household appliances to heart monitors. It is estimated that there are at least a million lines of code in the average car. As IoT explodes from millions of devices to tens of billions in the next few years, new challenges will emerge for software testing. Security, privacy, complexity, and competing standards will fuel the need for innovative testing. Customers don't care why your software failed in the connected chain—only that it did fail. Companies that focus on quality will ultimately be the successful brands. Learn what new approaches are required for testing the “zoo” of interconnected devices. As products increasingly connect physical hardware with applications, we must revisit old testing approaches. IoT is about analyzing data in real time, allowing testers to make quicker and more informed decisions. If IoT testing is in your future, this session is for you.

W7 Test Automation Strategies and Frameworks: What Should Your Team Do?

Gene Gotimer, Coveros, Inc.

Wed, 06/24/2015 - 11:30am

Agile practices have done a magnificent job of speeding up the software development process. Unfortunately, simply applying agile practices to testing isn't enough to keep testers at the same pace. Test automation is necessary to support agile delivery. Max Saperstone explores popular test automation frameworks and shares the benefits of applying these frameworks, their implementation strategies, and best usage practices. Focusing on the pros and cons of each framework, Max discusses data-driven, keyword-driven, and action-driven approaches. Find out which framework and automation strategy are most beneficial for specific situations. Although this presentation is tool agnostic, Max demonstrates automation with examples from current tooling options. If you are new to test automation or trying to optimize your current automation strategy, this session is for you.

W11 Establish an Integrated Test Automation Architecture

Wed, 06/24/2015 - 1:30pm

Implementing test automation requires more than selecting the best tool and starting to write automated tests. Because test automation tools must integrate with your development lifecycle and its various project management, build, integration, and release tools, you need an automation comprehensive architecture implementation plan. Drawing on his experiences at a large financial institution, Mike Sowers discusses the steps for a test automation architecture, identifying tool dependencies, establishing deployment plans, and selecting and reporting metrics. Challenges Mike’s organization faced included ensuring that the selected tools worked well with other application lifecycle tools, driving the adoption of automation across multiple project teams or departments, and communicating the quantitative and qualitative benefits to key stakeholders in management. Mike discusses things that went right (such as including the corporate architectural review board) and things that went wrong (allowing too much organizational separation between testers and automation engineers). Take back a To Do list of opportunities and issues to improve your test automation implementation or start a new one.

W15 Automate REST API Testing

Eric Smith, HomeAdvisor

Wed, 06/24/2015 - 3:00pm

As an organization grows, the body of code that needs to be regression tested constantly increases. However, to maintain high velocity and deliver new features, teams need to minimize the amount of manual regression testing. Eric Smith shares his lessons learned in automating RESTful API tests using JMeter, RSpec, and Spock. Gain insights into the pros and cons of each tool, take back practical knowledge about the tools available, and explore reasons why your shop should require RESTful automation as part of its acceptance test criteria. Many decisions must be made to automate API tests: choosing the platform; how to integrate with the current build and deploy process; and how to integrate with reporting tools to keep key stakeholders informed. Although the initial transition caused his teams to bend their traditional roles, Eric says that ultimately the team became more cross-functionally aligned and developed a greater sense of ownership for delivering a quality product.

T2 Reduce Test Automation Execution Time by 80%

Tanay Nagjee, Electric Cloud

Thu, 06/25/2015 - 10:15am

Software testers and quality assurance engineers are often pressured to cut testing time to ensure on-time product releases. Usually this means running fewer test cycles with the risk of worse software quality. As companies embrace a continuous integration (CI) that require frequent build and test cycles, the pressure to speed up automated testing is intense. Tanay Nagjee shows how you can cut the time to run an automated test suite by 80%—for example, from two hours to under 25 minutes. Find out how Tayay’s team broke down their test suites into bite-sized test that could be executed in parallel. Leveraging a cluster of computing horsepower (either on on-premise physical machines or in the cloud), you can refactor large test suites to execute in a fraction of the time it takes now. With real example data and a live demonstration, Tanay outlines a three-step approach to achieve these results within different test frameworks.

T3 Create Disposable Test Environments with Vagrant and Puppet

Gene Gotimer, Coveros, Inc.

Thu, 06/25/2015 - 10:15am

As the pace of development increases, testing has more to do and less time in which to do it. Software testing must evolve to meet delivery goals while continuing to meet quality objectives. Gene Gotimer explores how tools like Vagrant and Puppet work together to provide on-demand, disposable test environments that are delivered quickly, in a known state, with pre-populated test data and automated test fixture provisioning. With a single command, Vagrant provisions one or more virtual machines on a local box, in a private or public cloud. Puppet then takes over to install and configure software, setup test data, and get the system or systems ready for testing. Since the process is automated, anyone on the team can use the same Vagrant and Puppet scripts to get his own virtual environment for testing. When you are finished with it, Vagrant tears it back down and restores it to the same original state.

T6 Write Your Test Cases in a Domain-Specific Language

Beaumont Brush, Dematic, Inc.

Thu, 06/25/2015 - 11:30am

Manual test cases are difficult to write and costly to maintain. Beaumont Brush suggests that one of the more important but infrequently-discussed reasons is that manual tests are usually written in natural language, which is ineffective for describing test cases clearly. Employing a domain-specific language (DSL), Beaumont and his team approach their manual test cases exactly like programming code and gain the benefits of good development and design practices. He shares their coding standards, reusability approach, and object models that integrate transparently into the version control and code review workflow. Beaumont demonstrates two DSL approaches―a highly specified DSL written in Python and a more functional DSL that leverages Gherkin syntax and does not require a computer language to implement. By making your test cases easier to write and maintain, your team will improve its test suite and have time for automating more tests.

T7 Transform a Manual Testing Process to Incorporate Automation

Jim Trentadue, Ranorex

Thu, 06/25/2015 - 11:30am

Although most testing organizations have automation, it’s usually a subset of their overall efforts. Typically the processes for the department have been previously defined, and the automation team must adapt accordingly. The major issue is that test automation work and deliverables do not always fit into a defined manual testing process. Jim Trentadue explores what test automation professionals must do to be successful. These include understanding development standards for objects, structuring tests for modularity, and eliminating manual efforts. Jim reviews the revisions required to a V-model testing process to fuse in the test automation work. This requires changes to the manual testing process, specifically at the test plan and test case level. Learn the differences between automated and manual testing process needs, how to start a test automation process that ties into your overall testing process, and how to do a gap analysis for those actively doing automation, connecting better with the functional testing team.

T11 Test Automation: Investment Today Pays Back Tomorrow

Al Wagner, IBM

Thu, 06/25/2015 - 1:30pm

The results of a recent survey, authored by IBM and TechWell, showed that testers want to spend more time automating, more time planning, and more time designing tests—and less time setting up test environments and creating test data. So, where should testers and their organizations invest their time and money to achieve the desired results? What is the right level of technical ability for today’s testers to be successful? As this ongoing debate continues, the simple answer remains: It depends. Join Al Wagner as he explores the many opportunities in the world of testing and test automation. Consider the many approaches for building your automated testing skills and the solutions you create, weighing the pros and cons of each. Explore the options for test and dev organizations to consider to speed up releases and deliver more value to their companies. Leave with the ability to determine which approaches make sense for you and your employer.