Test Automation

Tutorials

MB The Challenges of BIG Testing: Automation, Virtualization, Outsourcing, and More SOLD OUT

Hans Buwalda, LogiGear

Mon, 05/05/2014 - 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 strategies he's developed for organizing and managing testing on large projects. Learn how to design tests specifically for automation, including how to incorporate keyword testing and other techniques.

ME Management Issues in Test Automation

Dorothy Graham, Independent Test Consultant

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

Many organizations never achieve the significant benefits that are promised from automated test execution. Surprisingly often, this is not due to technical factors but to management issues. Dot Graham describes the most important management issues you must address for test automation success, and helps you understand and choose the best approaches for your organization—no matter which automation tools you use or your current state of automation.

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.

MJ Exploratory Testing Explained

Paul Holland, Testing Thoughts

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

Exploratory testing is an approach to testing that emphasizes the freedom and responsibility of testers to continually optimize the value of their work. It is the process of three mutually supportive activities—learning, test design, and test execution—done in parallel. With skill and practice, exploratory testers typically uncover an order of magnitude more problems than when the same amount of effort is spent on procedurally scripted testing. All testers conduct exploratory testing in one way or another, but few know how to do it systematically to obtain the greatest benefits.

MK Testing the Data Warehouse―Big Data, Big Problems

Geoff Horne, NZTester Magazine

Mon, 05/05/2014 - 1:00pm

Data warehouses have become a popular mechanism for collecting, organizing, and making information readily available for strategic decision making. The ability to review historical trends and monitor near real-time operational data has become a key competitive advantage for many organizations. Yet the methods for assuring the quality of these valuable assets are quite different from those of transactional systems. Ensuring that the appropriate testing is performed is a major challenge for many enterprises.

TA Testing Mobile Applications from All Angles NEW

Randy Rice, Rice Consulting Services, Inc.

Tue, 05/06/2014 - 8:30am

As the need for testing mobile applications increases, so does the need to understand and apply test practices that cover more than just functional correctness. Randy Rice leads you through techniques for designing the right tests for your mobile applications, whether they are on the device or on a website. Learn how to know which items of functionality are important to test based on relative risk. Randy presents his visual method of how to rank important attributes including usability, compatibility, accessibility, and security, and then how to design tests for them.

TG Test Automation Patterns: Issues and Solutions NEW

Seretta Gamba, Steria Mummert ISS GmbH

Dorothy Graham, Independent Test Consultant

Tue, 05/06/2014 - 8:30am

Automating system level test execution can result in many problems. It is surprising to find that many people encounter the same problems, yet they are not aware of common solutions that have worked well for others. These problem/solution pairs are called “patterns.” Seretta Gamba recognized the commonality of these test automation issues and their solutions and, together with Dorothy Graham, has organized them into Test Automation Patterns. Although unit test patterns are well known, Seretta and Dorothy’s patterns address more general issues.

TH Introducing Keyword-driven Test Automation

Hans Buwalda, LogiGear

Tue, 05/06/2014 - 8:30am

In both agile and traditional projects, keyword-driven testing—when done correctly—has proven to be a powerful way to attain a high level of automation. Many testing organizations use keyword-driven testing but aren't realizing the full benefits of scalability and maintainability that are essential to keep up with the demands of testing today's software. Hans Buwalda describes the keyword approach, and how you use it to can meet the very aggressive goal that he calls the "5 percent challenge"―automate 95 percent of your tests with no more than 5 percent of your total testing effort.

Concurrent Sessions

W3 Automation through the Back Door

Seretta Gamba, Steria Mummert ISS GmbH

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

When working on test automation, it seems that even though you have done everything right—good architecture, efficient framework, and good tools—you still don’t make progress. The product Seretta Gamba’s team was to automate had become so successful that anyone with even a little domain knowledge was sent to the field while those left on the automation team didn’t really know the full application.

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.

W8 Continuous Testing through Service Virtualization

Allan Wagner, IBM

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

The demand to accelerate software delivery and for teams to continuously test and release high quality software sooner has never been greater. However, whether your release strategy is based on schedule or quality, the entire delivery process hits the wall when agility stops at testing. When software/services that are part of the delivered system or required environments are unavailable for testing, the entire team suffers. Al Wagner explains how to remove these testing interruptions, decrease project risk, and release higher quality software sooner.

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.

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.

T3 Patterns of Automation: Simplify Your Test Code

Jeff "Cheezy" Morgan, LeanDog

Thu, 05/08/2014 - 9:45am

Many organizations are introducing test automation only to discover it is more difficult than they anticipated. The fact is that good test automation requires good coding practices. Good test automation requires good design. To do anything else will lead to spaghetti code that is hard to maintain or update. If you’re new to coding or new to automation, it is difficult to know where to begin. Join Cheezy as he describes and demonstrates lessons he has learned while helping numerous organizations adopt test automation.

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.

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.

T15 Designing and Implementing Automation at a Large Financial Institution

Michael Sowers, SQE

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

Planning, designing, implementing, and tracking results for QA and test automation can be challenging. It is vital to ensure that any tools selected will work 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. Mike Sowers discusses his experiences creating an automation architecture, establishing tool deployment plans, and selecting and reporting tool metrics at a large financial institution.

T17 Continuous Test Automation

Jared Richardson, Agile Artisans

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

Today’s test organizations often have sizable investments in test automation. Unfortunately, running and maintaining these test suites represents another sizable investment. All too often this hard work is abandoned and teams revert to a more costly, but familiar, manual approach. Jared Richardson says a more practical solution is to integrate test automation suites with continuous integration (CI). A CI system monitors your source code and compiles the system after every change. Once the build is complete, test suites are automatically run.

T20 Making Testing at eBay More Realistic

Kamini Dandapani, eBay, Inc.

Thu, 05/08/2014 - 3:00pm

Have you had customers report issues that cannot be reproduced in the test environment? Have you had defects leak into production because your test environment is not equivalent to production? In the past, the eBay test environment didn’t mirror production data and had security, feature, and service fidelity issues. Kamini Dandapani shares how eBay solved these problems. They now dedicate a portion of their production environment to enable eBay engineers to do more realistic testing.

T22 Top Practices for Successful Mobile Test Automation

Fred Beringer, SOASTA

Thu, 05/08/2014 - 3:00pm

Mobile apps bring a new set of challenges to testing—fast-paced development cycles with multiple releases per week, multiple app technologies and development platforms to support, dozens of devices and form factors, and additional pressure from enterprise and consumers who are less than patient with low quality apps. And with these new challenges comes a new set of mistakes testers can make! Fred Beringer works with dozens of mobile test teams to help them avoid common traps when building test automation for mobile apps.

T24 Game On: Automating Sports Video Game Testing

Fazeel Gareeboo, EA Sports

Thu, 05/08/2014 - 3:00pm

Sports video games are generally on a short cycle time—tied to the start of a particular sport’s season. Like all video games, the pressure is always on to add more features to sell more games, and the list of “cool” features is endless. Getting buy-in to implement automated testing in this environment can be a challenge. And once you get that buy-in, your next challenge is to ensure it provides significant value to the game team. Fazeel Gareeboo shares the lessons they learned at EA Sports—lessons you can take back to your project.

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.