Agile Test Automation

Tutorials

MD Hands On with Selenium and WebDriver NEW

Alan Richardson, Compendium Developments

Mon, 05/05/2014 - 8:30am

Selenium WebDriver is an open source automation tool for test driving browsers. People sometimes find the API daunting and their initial automation code brittle and poorly structured. In this introduction, Alan Richardson provides hints and tips gained from his years of experience both using WebDriver and helping others improve their use of the tool. Alan starts at the beginning, explaining the basic WebDriver API capabilities—simple interrogation and navigation—and then moves on to synchronization strategies and working with AJAX applications.

MG Take a Test Drive of Acceptance Test-Driven Development NEW

Jared Richardson, Agile Artisans

Mon, 05/05/2014 - 8:30am

The practice of agile software development requires a clear understanding of business needs. Misunderstanding requirements causes waste, slipped schedules, and mistrust within the organization. Jared Richardson shows how good acceptance tests can reduce misunderstanding of requirements. A testable requirement provides a single source that serves as the analysis document, acceptance criteria, regression test suite, and progress-tracker for any given feature. Jared explores the creation, evaluation, and use of testable requirements by the business and developers.

Concurrent Sessions

W4 The Three Pillars Approach to Your Agile Test Strategy

Bob Galen, Velocity Partners

Wed, 05/07/2014 - 11:30am

Far too often, agile transformations focus just on development teams, agile frameworks, or technical practices as adoption strategies unfold. Often the testing activity and the testing teams are left behind in agile strategy development or worse yet, they are only along for the ride. That’s simply not an effective transformation strategy. Join experienced agile coach Bob Galen as he shares the Three Pillars Framework for establishing a balanced strategic plan to effectively implement agile quality and testing.

W9 Leveraging Open Source Automation: A Selenium WebDriver Example

David Dang, Zenergy Technologies

Wed, 05/07/2014 - 1:45pm

As online activities create more revenue than ever, organizations are turning to Selenium both to test their web applications and to reduce costs. Since Selenium is open source, there is no licensing fee. However, as with purchased tools, the same automation challenges remain, and users do not have formal support and maintenance. Proper strategic planning and the use of advanced automation concepts are a must to ensure successful Selenium automation efforts.

W10 Risk-Based Testing for Agile Projects

Erik van Veenendaal, Improve Quality IT Services BV

Wed, 05/07/2014 - 1:45pm

Many projects implicitly use some kind of risk-based approach for prioritizing testing activities. However, critical testing decisions should be based on a product risk assessment process using key business drivers as its foundation. For agile projects, this assessment should be both thorough and lightweight. PRISMA (PRoduct RISk MAnagement) is a highly practical method for performing systematic product risk assessments. Learn how to employ PRISMA techniques in agile projects using risk-poker.

W15 Implementing Testing for Behavior-Driven Development Using Cucumber

Max Saperstone, Coveros

Wed, 05/07/2014 - 3:00pm

With the behavior-driven development (BDD) methodology, development teams write high level, plain natural language tests to describe and exercise a system. Unfortunately, it is difficult to develop BDD tests that encompass all interfaces and write tests that can be reused in multiple scenarios. Specifying BDD tests to run as part of different test scenarios without duplicating work frequently requires substantial effort and rework. But Cucumber provides a robust framework for writing BDD tests.

W16 Meet Big Agile: Testing on Large-Scale Projects

Geoff Meyer, Dell, Inc.

Wed, 05/07/2014 - 3:00pm

Are you embarking on a large-scale, globally distributed, multi-team scrum project? Have you already identified the potential testing challenges that lie ahead? Or have you belatedly encountered them and are now working on them in real-time?

T9 Accelerate Testing in Agile through a Shared Business Domain Language

Laurent Py, Smartesting

Thu, 05/08/2014 - 11:15am

In agile projects, when the cycle from ideas to production shortens from months to hours, each software development activity—including testing—is impacted. Reaching this level of agility in testing requires massive automation. But test execution is only one side of the coin. How do we design and maintain tests at the required speed and scale? Testing should start very early in the development process and be used as acceptance criteria by the project stakeholders.

T11 Performance Testing in Agile: The Path to 5 Star App Reviews

Shane Evans, Hewlett-Packard

Thu, 05/08/2014 - 11:15am

Application performance is the first aspect of quality that every customer experiences. It can mean the difference between winning and losing a customer—between a 5-star app and a 2. No matter how sexy your application is, if it doesn’t load quickly, customers will turn to your competitor. Quality is core to agile, but agile doesn’t mention performance testing specifically. The challenge is that generally user stories don’t include the phrase “…in 3 seconds or less” and developers just focus on developing.

T14 Build the Right Regression Suite with Behavior-Driven Testing

Anand Bagmar, ThoughtWorks

Thu, 05/08/2014 - 1:30pm

Manual functional testing is a slow, tedious, and error prone process. As we continue to incrementally build software, the corresponding regression test suite continues to grow. Rarely is time allotted to consolidate and keep these test cases in sync with the product under development. If these test cases are used as the basis for automation, the resulting suite is composed of very granular tests that are often quite brittle in nature.

Keynotes

K4 Extreme Automation: Software Quality for the Next Generation Enterprise

Theresa Lanowitz, voke, inc.

Thu, 05/08/2014 - 8:30am

Software runs the business. The modern testing organization aspires to be a change agent and an inspiration for quality throughout the entire lifecycle. To be a change agent, the testing organization must have the right people and skill sets, the right processes in place to ensure proper governance, and the right technology to aid in the delivery of software in support of the business line. Traditionally, testing organizations have focused on the people and process aspect of solving quality issues.