Test Automation

Tutorials

MA The Challenges of BIG Testing: Automation, Virtualization, Outsourcing, and More

Hans Buwalda, LogiGear

Mon, 09/28/2015 - 8:30am

Large-scale and complex testing projects can stress the testing and automation practices we have learned through the years, resulting in less than optimal outcomes. However, a number of innovative ideas and concepts are emerging to better support industrial-strength testing for big projects. Hans Buwalda shares his experiences and presents strategies for organizing and managing testing on large projects. Learn how to design tests specifically for automation, including how to incorporate techniques like keyword testing and BDD. Discover what roles virtualization and the cloud can play—and the potential pitfalls of such options. Hans also describes the major challenges with global teams including time zones and cultural differences, and offers seven common problem “patterns” in globalization and what you can do to address them. Among the other takeaways from this class are tips to make your automation more stable and recommendations on how to deal with the numerous versions and configurations common in large projects.

MF Plan, Architect, and Implement Test Automation within the Lifecycle

Michael Sowers, TechWell Corp.

Mon, 09/28/2015 - 8:30am

In test automation, we must often use several tools that have been developed or acquired over time with little consideration of an overall plan or architecture, and without considering the need for integration. As a result, productivity suffers and frustrations increase. Join Mike Sowers as he shares experiences from multiple organizations in creating an integrated test automation plan and developing a test automation architecture. Mike discusses both the good (engaging the technical architecture team) and the bad (too much isolation between test automators and test designers) on his test automation journey in large and small enterprises. Discover approaches to ensure that the test tools you currently have—and the new test tools you acquire or develop—will work well with other testing and application lifecycle software. Explore approaches to drive test automation adoption across multiple project teams and departments, and communicate the real challenges and potential benefits to your stakeholders.

ML High-Volume Combinatorial Test Automation NEW

Bj Rollison, Testing Mentor

Mon, 09/28/2015 - 1:00pm

Imagine you are assigned to test a feature with twenty independent parameters, with five possible states for each parameter. The total number of possible combinations is greater than a half trillion. At one test per millisecond, it would take more than 3,000 years to test all possible combinations. Bj Rollison explains that historical evidence shows that the vast majority of errors are caused by the interaction between two parameters. Pairwise testing is a systematic technique using powerful tools to efficiently produce a pairwise subset of all parameters. This technique quickly uncovers hard-to-find bugs while improving code coverage. Unfortunately, most discussions about pairwise tests only consider this technique on small-scale projects. However, its real power is revealed when we are faced with complex features that have multiple input parameters that interact. Bj introduces advanced modeling concepts to model input parameters. Using simple test framework, delegates will use a powerful, free tool to test a high volume of inputs.

Note: This hands-on tutorial assumes that delegates are familiar with the basic concepts of pairwise testing and a basic understanding of programming. Delegates are strongly encouraged to bring a laptop with Visual Studio or Visual Studio C# Express installed.

TC Getting Started with Risk-Based Testing

Dale Perry, TechWell Corp.

Tue, 09/29/2015 - 8:30am

Whether you are new to testing or looking for a better way to organize your test practices, understanding risk is essential to successful testing. Dale Perry describes a general risk-based framework—applicable to any development lifecycle model—to help you make critical testing decisions earlier and with more confidence. Learn how to focus your testing effort, what elements to test, and how to organize test designs and documentation. Review the fundamentals of risk identification, analysis, and the role testing plays in risk mitigation. Develop an inventory of test objectives to help prioritize your testing and translate objectives into a concrete strategy for creating tests. Focus your tests on the areas essential to your stakeholders. Execution and assessing test results provide a better understanding of both the effectiveness of your testing and the potential for failure in your software. Take back a proven approach to organize your testing efforts and new ways to add more value to your project and organization.

TK Test Design for Better Test Automation SOLD OUT NEW

Hans Buwalda, LogiGear

Tue, 09/29/2015 - 1:00pm

When automated tests are cumbersome to maintain, we often view this as a technical problem. However, an often-overlooked factor is the role that testers play in making automation scalable and maintainable. Test design can help or hurt how automation engineers can implement tests efficiently. If tests are too detailed or lack focus, good automation becomes virtually impossible. In this tutorial—for both testers and automation engineers—Hans Buwalda addresses what it means for test design when tests are to be automated. See why successful automated testing is not so much a technical challenge as it is a test design challenge. Hans shares a template that you can follow to get your tests organized and ready for efficient automation. Whether you work on a traditional or agile project, join Hans to learn how techniques including action-based testing, behavior-driven development, and exploratory testing will help you achieve better test design and great automation results.

TL Pairwise Testing Explained

Lee Copeland, TechWell Corp.

Tue, 09/29/2015 - 1:00pm

Many software systems are required to process huge combinations of input data, all of which deserve to be tested. Since we rarely have time to create and execute test cases for all combinations, our fundamental problem in testing is how to choose a reasonably-sized subset that will find a large percentage of defects and can be performed within the limited time and budget available. Lee Copeland says that pairwise testing is the most effective—but not well-understood—test design technique to deal with this problem. The answer is not to attempt to test all combinations of all values for all input variables but to test all pairs of variables. This significantly reduces the number of tests that must be created and run but still finds a large percentage of defects. Lee demonstrates the effectiveness of pairwise testing through the use of orthogonal arrays, James Bach’s all-pairs algorithm, and Microsoft’s PICT tool. Learn to apply the pairwise testing technique as you work through a number of hands-on exercises.

TM Integrating Automated Testing into DevOps

Jeffery Payne, Coveros, Inc.

Tue, 09/29/2015 - 1:00pm

Business demands and agile development processes are driving the pursuit of faster software releases, spawning a set of new practices called DevOps. At the forefront of the DevOps movement are rapid deployment, continuous integration, and continuous delivery—all of which require a high level of test automation across the application lifecycle. Join Jeffery Payne as he discusses the unique challenges associated with integrating automated testing into continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) environments. Learn how CI/CD works, appropriate tooling, and test integration points. Find out how to integrate your existing test automation frameworks into a fast release, DevOps environment. In addition to technology issues, Jeffery covers another key to DevOps success: the integration of development, testing, and operations processes—and people—with deep and honest communications among teams. Leave with a roadmap for integrating test automation with continuous integration and delivery so that every stakeholder has strong confidence that changes made to the code base will function as expected.

Concurrent Sessions

W3 ROI Robbers in Test Automation

Greg Paskal, ARGO Data Resource Corporation

Wed, 09/30/2015 - 11:30am

Test automation effectiveness can be significantly compromised by over abstraction, improper object recognition, ineffective synchronization, poor data strategies, and more. In fact, Greg Paskal has identified more than a dozen common issues in test automation efforts that can rob you of potential value. Greg shares how your test automation development and maintenance are adversely impacted by these issues. Many automation frameworks are difficult to scale or expensive to maintain, resulting in little to no return on investment (ROI). Learn about the test automation N-Curve effect and how it is directly impacted by ROI robbers, resulting in an unsettling ride on the “ROI Roller Coaster.” Whether you're new to test automation or have years of experience, it's smart to consider what can hinder your results. Learn about the most common mistakes made in test automation and how to avoid—or overcome—these common ROI robbers.

W8 Service and Network Virtualization: Keys to Continuous Testing

Clint Sprauve, HP

Todd DeCapua, HP

Wed, 09/30/2015 - 1:45pm

Many development and test organizations must work within the confines of compressed release cycles, various agile methodologies, and cloud and mobile environments for their business applications. So, how can test organizations keep up with the pace of development and increase the quality of their applications under test? Clint Sprauve and Todd DeCapua describe how service virtualization and network virtualization can help your team improve speed and increase quality. Learn how to use service virtualization to simulate third-party or internal web services to remove wait times and reduce the need for high-cost testing infrastructures. Take back techniques to incorporate network virtualization into the testing environment to simulate real-world network conditions. Learn from Clint and Todd how the combination of service and network virtualization allows teams to implement a robust and consistent continuous testing strategy to reduce defects in production applications.

W12 Test Automation: The Special Cases

Hans Buwalda, LogiGear

Wed, 09/30/2015 - 1:45pm

Many functional tests of dialogs and web pages are done through the user interface, and the expected results of each test are clear. However, Hans Buwalda recognizes that some applications are “special” and pose challenges for automated testing. For example, oil exploration applications frequently produce complex 3D graphics output that is not easy to describe in a test case, let alone write the automation code. A game may implement randomized behavior, and a test must know where that behavior is in that game and where it needs to go next.

W15 Enterprise Automated Regression Testing with the Robot Framework

Bryan Lamb, Experian

Wed, 09/30/2015 - 3:00pm

You know you need to automate your tests. You’ve attended countless sessions and witnessed many talented experts explaining how they’ve built their custom test automation frameworks. You’ve thought, “I wish one of those experts would just give me their framework so I could get down to the business of writing automated tests.” If you’re responsible for creating diverse, scalable automated tests but don’t have the time, budget, or a skilled-enough team to create yet another custom test automation framework, then Bryan Lamb says you need to know about the Robot Framework. He reveals how his team uses this powerful, free, open source, generic framework to create continuous enterprise automated regression tests. Join Bryan to get a look at Robot Framework—where to find, how to install it, how to create and run test cases locally or via a browser cloud, how to use pre-built or custom libraries, and even how to integrate it into a Jenkins build and deployment pipeline.

T3 Selenium: Practical Tips and Tricks

Andrew Krug, Revcontent

Thu, 10/01/2015 - 9:45am

Already using Selenium but have some unanswered questions? Want to learn how to use Selenium like a pro? Join Andrew Krug as he shares the best and most useful tips and tricks. Topics covered include headless test execution, testing HTTP status codes, blacklisting third-party content with a proxy server, repurposing your Selenium scripts to build an initial load testing suite, various ways to perform broken image checking, testing “forgot password” end-to-end, working with A/B testing (most notably, how to opt-out of it), testing file downloads (both the easy way and the hard way), how to add robust debugging output to your tests, and adding visual testing to your existing Selenium tests. If you're already using Selenium and looking for a way to take your automated testing practice to the next level, then this session is for you.

T9 Automate REST Services Testing with RestAssured

Eing Ong, Intuit, Inc.

Thu, 10/01/2015 - 11:15am

Many browser, UI, and Java-based tools and frameworks can help you test REST services. However, in the world of continuous integration and delivery, manual UI- or browser-based tools typically fall short in many aspects—from early test development to developer support. When using Java-based libraries such as HttpClient, much code has to be written for all aspects of a web service call. These extensions or wrappers tend to be complex, hard to read, and difficult to maintain. This is where RestAssured comes in. RestAssured is an open source Java DSL for testing REST-based services, making test code more readable, easier to write, and cheaper to maintain. Learn how easily you can write HTTP get and post requests as well as more complex scenarios involving session management, authentication, and (de)serialization of objects. Take back good practices and an open source command line tool that can help you jumpstart your RestAssured testing.

T15 Make Your Test Automation SMARTER

Jim Trentadue, Ranorex

Thu, 10/01/2015 - 1:30pm

Test automation is not an exact science. As we drive toward an automation solution that validates accurately, the application or data undergoes changes, making it challenging to maintain the tests. The test automation professional must plan to make each test as predictive as possible. Jim Trentadue introduces a framework called S.M.A.R.T.E.R that can be used to accomplish this. The acronym is defined as: Strategy for understanding application behavior and variations, Methodology for implementing the logical model, Adaptable across different platforms or browsers, Roadmap for outlining the sequence and priority of those tests to address first, Toolbox to work with technologies available, Experienced personnel requirements for those to support such changes, and a Repeatable design for future success. By implementing this framework, your automation will be structured for ongoing success by making your test cases SMARTER!

T21 MetaAutomation: Five Patterns for Test Automation

Matt Griscom

Thu, 10/01/2015 - 3:00pm

A huge gap exists between conventional results in test automation and the potential value that automation can bring to software quality. Matt Griscom presents an effective way to achieve that value with the MetaAutomation pattern language—fast, scalable, and reliable automation. MetaAutomation’s artifacts contain focused, structured information to make results immediately actionable, informative for the entire product team, and available for robust analysis. With these patterns, quality information automatically goes to the people who need to know. With a complete implementation, false positives and false negatives don’t interrupt people’s work. Manual testing is accelerated and focused—not confused by the false promise of automated manual tests. Learn the five patterns of MetaAutomation—Atomic Check, Precondition Pool, Parallel Run, Smart Retry, and Automated Triage. Join Matt to explore the nature and importance of MetaAutomation to software quality, and take away tips for quickly improving automation projects.