STARCANADA 2016 - Test Automation
Tuesday, October 25
Selenium Test Automation: From the Ground Up
Knowledge of Selenium, the industry-standard tool for testing web applications, is a much sought after skill in today’s world of test automation. If you want to learn Selenium, then this full-day tutorial is a great start. Cheezy Morgan shows you how to build test automation using Selenium. But he doesn’t stop there. He uses his years of experience to show you how to build automation that is clean and easy to maintain. Cheezy introduces other tools that work with Selenium to help manage the data used to drive your tests, evaluate JavaScript-heavy applications,...
Test Design for Better Test Automation
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...
Wednesday, October 26
Test-Driven Everything—with Deliberate Collaboration
You've heard that quality belongs to everybody on an agile team. You've heard that testers and developers should collaborate in order to drive quality higher. You've heard that automated tests help a team continuously validate the quality. Well, it's time to stop just thinking and talking about these things! It's time to make them happen! Watch “Cheezy” Morgan do this in front of your eyes. Watch him build a web application, driven by acceptance and unit tests. Discover how a product owner, tester, and developer collaborate closely and deliberately to create...
Mobile Untethered: Lessons Learned without Wires
Are you seeking insight into how “going mobile" changes the dev and test roles in real-life organizations? Jennifer Bonine and Rick Faulise take a focused look at the automation of mobile testing: the need, the options, and the tools. They discuss strategies that work—and have not worked—for companies making the transition to mobile. What are the things you, as a developer or tester moving into mobile web and mobile apps, must think about? You need to understand the skill set changes required and the importance of keeping up to date on what companies are looking...
Performance Testing in Agile and DevOps Environments
As organizations embrace agile and DevOps delivery models, non-functional performance testing becomes a challenge. While functional validation continues to mature in Agile, many organizations are either struggling to integrate application performance into the delivery model or are addressing performance through an end of sprint hardening approach. Join Syed Hossain as he explores the challenges of performance testing in agile and DevOps environments. Learn proven approaches to performance testing—staggered sprints, incremental testing, and targeted sprints....
Addressing the Challenges of Mobile Test Automation
As technology continues to disrupt every industry, mobile applications are increasingly becoming a primary way to interact with customers. Mobile application test automation tools and frameworks are far from being as mature as web test automation tools. The mobile test automation space is much more complex than web because of the number of devices that follow different standards. Simulators and emulators partially address this mobile diversity, however, to feel confident releasing an application to market, a deep understanding of what libraries, tools, and...
A Rapid Testing Approach to Test Automation
There are many wonderful ways tools can be used to help software testing. Yet, all across the industry, tools are poorly applied, which adds terrible waste, confusion, and pain to what is already a hard problem. Why is this so? What can be done? Michael Bolton thinks that the fundamental problem is a shallow, narrow, and ritualistic approach to tool use. This is encouraged by the pandemic, rarely examined, and absolutely false belief that testing is a mechanical, repetitive process. Good testing, like programming, is instead a challenging intellectual process, and...
Objects vs. Images: Choosing the Right GUI Test Tool Architecture
Most popular GUI test tools are based on an object recognition architecture. They recognize and manipulate screen objects by communicating with the underlying GUI subsystem. A new breed of tools has been introduced in the past few years that implements an image recognition architecture. These tools use sophisticated image processing and OCR technology to recognize objects by their appearance on the display. Image recognition-based tools have distinct advantages in some environments, but object-based tools are a better choice in other situations. Join Chip Groder...
Thursday, October 27
Test Design for Responsive Websites
Websites built with responsive design come with the added testing challenge of having a single web application working across all screen sizes and many devices. So, how can you ensure your application will render correctly without testing on a huge number of smartphones, tablets, and desktops? Join Adam Rosenberg as he shares how to make intelligent test design choices for the best selection of devices to test on. For example, which is more important—the screen size or the pixel density? How do these affect how a page renders and what breakpoint is hit? When do...
How to Build a Fully Open Source Test Automation Framework
Automated testing can be difficult, slow to implement, involve expensive and non-compatible software, and require a high level of technical expertise to use. Join Matt Joste as he presents Ryerson University's Automation Framework, put together using best-in-class open source software. The framework allows software developers, product owners, and testers without a technical background to write and run automated scripts. This modular framework addresses both functional and nonfunctional automated tests—performance, security, and accessibility—and is both agile and...
Sensible Test Automation
Your boss has given you the directive to “automate everything.” So, what’s behind this? Is he expecting to reduce costs? Implement the latest silver-bullet tool that will save the company? Increase test coverage to avoid future embarrassment? How should you respond? Jerry Penner shows how you can manage expectations by asking the right questions and framing in business terms the capabilities of computer-aided testing. Discussion includes good and bad reasons to automate, and what should and should not be automated so you can find more of the important bugs faster...
Build Your Open Source Performance Testing Platform in the Cloud
Proprietary performance testing platforms can be complex, expensive, and difficult to scale. With the right approach, everything from continuous integration, to continuous deployment pipelines, to full-scale production loads can be supported, but a dizzying array of platforms, services, and approaches available in AWS and the open-source community must be navigated to arrive at solutions that work. Join Gopal Brugalette and explore how to build a performance testing platform in the cloud using open source tools. Gopal shares what he has learned from his failures...
Slowing Down to Speed Up:The Benefits of A Custom Automation Framework
With today’s shortened software release cycles, products need to be tested quickly and reliably. Automating tests is even more challenging as we are often building the next generation product even as we maintain the legacy products. Join Christine McGarry as she describes how she automated tests for dataset comparison for data stored in substantially differing SQL database schemas. Christine shares a case study on how the test automation strategy and tactics were defined for testing datasets output from distinct versions of an application. She provides insight...
The Future of Applications and Application Testing
“Software is eating the world,” and as a result, companies are building novel applications to support their business and products. This is the main drive behind the microservices trend where a product's architecture is comprised of many independent applications, both new and legacy. Testing and deploying any microservices architecture require high levels of coordination between components. A significant part of this approach is keeping interfaces compatible with other parts of the infrastructure, which means that collaboration and automation are critical. Dwayne...