Test Automation

Tutorials

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

Hans Buwalda, LogiGear

Mon, 05/04/2015 - 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 keyword testing and other techniques.

MF Planning, Architecting and Implementing Test Automation within the Life Cycle NEW

Mike Sowers, Software Quality Engineering

Mon, 05/04/2015 - 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.

MH Take a Test Drive: Acceptance Test-Driven Development

Jared Richardson, Agile Artisans

Mon, 05/04/2015 - 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.

TB Selenium Test Automation: From the Ground Up

Dave Haeffner, The Selenium Guidebook

Tue, 05/05/2015 - 8:30am

Want to learn how to use Selenium from the ground up? Dave Haeffner shows you how to start from nothing and build a well-factored, maintainable, resilient, and parallelized set of tests that will run locally, on a continuous integration server, against a Selenium Grid, and in the cloud. These tests will work reliably and across all the browsers you care about, while exercising relevant functionality that matters to your business.

TD Successful Test Automation: A Manager’s View SOLD OUT

Dorothy Graham, Software Test Consultant

Tue, 05/05/2015 - 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.

TL Integrating Automated Testing into DevOps NEW

Jeffery Payne, Coveros, Inc.

Tue, 05/05/2015 - 1:00pm

In many organizations, agile development processes are driving the pursuit of faster software releases, which has spawned a set of new practices called DevOps. DevOps stresses communications and integration between development and operations, including rapid deployment, continuous integration, and continuous delivery. Because DevOps practices require confidence that changes made to the code base will function as expected, automated testing is essential.

Concurrent Sessions

W3 An Automation Framework for Everyone

Chris Loder, Halogen Software

Wed, 05/06/2015 - 11:30am

Chris Loder shares how his team at Halogen Software has implemented Selenium in a framework that everyone in his company's R&D group can use. With an ever-increasing amount of manual regression testing, the team needed an easy-to-use automation framework. Chris presents an example of how the framework they developed at Halogen Software is used and, while doing so, shows parts of the supporting code that automation developers will find interesting. Written in Java, the framework is using Selenium in some pretty cool ways.

W9 Leveraging Open Source Automation: A Selenium WebDriver Example

David Dang, Zenergy Technologies

Wed, 05/06/2015 - 1:45pm

As online activities create more revenue, organizations are turning to Selenium 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 use of advanced automation concepts are musts to ensure successful Selenium automation efforts.

W12 Eliminate Regression Testing through Continuous Deployment

Matthew Heusser, Excelon Development

Wed, 05/06/2015 - 1:45pm

Most traditional teams do testing at least twice—once during development as new features are created and again during release candidate testing right before release. As a system grows, regression testing takes more and more time, making tight releases impossible—or at least risky—and adding to the burden of maintaining automated tests. Matt Heusser suggests that adopting continuous integration (with its continuous testing) and continuous delivery (with its associated production monitoring) can eliminate the need for classic regression testing.

W15 Reduce Third-Party Tool Dependencies in Your Test Framework

Chris Mauck, Neustar, Inc.

Wed, 05/06/2015 - 3:00pm

Have you found yourself forced to use outdated test tools because the cost to migrate was prohibitive? Have you abandoned or rewritten existing tests because it was easier (and cheaper) than migrating? With technology ever changing, most businesses struggle to keep up with producing high-quality products for the lowest price possible. And it is usually testers who suffer the most, as they are forced to use tools that are outdated, or no longer supported, because the company cannot afford the migration cost.

T1 Stop Maintaining Multiple Test Environments

Joel Tosi, DevJam

Thu, 05/07/2015 - 9:45am

Today, most of us struggle with non-production environments. Either the test data is not right or consistent, the dependencies are mismanaged, or “They just aren't quite like production.” Instead of striving for simpler environments, most organizations add test environments―pre-prod, UAT, stage, QAB, and so on. And they end up spending more and more time troubleshooting and maintaining environments rather than building and learning. It does not have to be this way.

T3 Verify Complex Product Migrations with Automation

Marquis Waller, Ricoh

Jeff Sikkink, Ricoh

Thu, 05/07/2015 - 9:45am

In the world of agile, automation is king. When faced with testing multiple versions of software, either while migrating or supporting multiple versions in the field, many teams give up, convinced that automation cannot be achieved. Marquis Waller and Jeff Sikkink provide insights into how using tools—Jenkins, VMware API, Selenium, and others—can allow you to create a rich set of migration tests. They discuss the challenges they face maintaining migration testing for a large enterprise workflow product that runs on three different operating systems (AIX, Linux, Windows).

T4 Mobile App Testing: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Jon Hagar, Independent Consultant

Thu, 05/07/2015 - 9:45am

Mobile app testing has lots of good practices, some not so useful (bad) concepts, and some really ugly, don’t-ever-do ones. In the tradition of James Whittaker’s How to Break Software books, Jon Hagar applies the testing “attack” concept to mobile app software. Jon starts by defining the big problems and challenges of testing mobile app software and examines the patterns of product failures that you must attack. He then shares a set of good, bad, and ugly test techniques, which testers and developers can direct against their software to find important bugs quickly.

T5 Release Automation: Better Quality, Faster Deployment, Amazing ROI

Bryan Linder, tap|QA

Thu, 05/07/2015 - 9:45am

A great deal of confusion surrounds the concepts of release automation, continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment. Even some industry experts are confused about the differences. How these concepts work progressively to achieve high quality software delivery is generating a lot of discussion and controversy. Bryan Linder defines the methodology, processes, and tools associated with release automation, as well as the differences between its maturity levels.

T9 Automate Legacy-System Testing: Easy, Reliable, and Extendible

Emanuil Slavov, Komfo, Inc.

Thu, 05/07/2015 - 11:15am

Everyone loves working on a greenfield project. You’re starting fresh and nothing holds you back. Unfortunately, for most testers, this is a rare occurrence. Chances are you will work on legacy applications. Because these often have no automated tests, developers are afraid to make bold changes. More testers than developers can be assigned to these projects. Changing one line of code may require multiple days of manual testing. Eventually work grinds to a halt. Sound familiar? Emanuil Slavov explains how to deal with this sticky situation without losing your mind.

T14 Survival Guide: Taming the Data Quality Beast

Shauna Ayers, Availity

Catherine Cruz Agosto, Availity

Thu, 05/07/2015 - 1:30pm

As companies scramble to adjust to the demands of an increasingly data-driven world, testers are told “go test data quality” without any guidance as to what that entails or how to go about it. The fact that the data is often a living, flowing ecosystem, rather than just a single object, requires the use of different strategies to gain meaningful insights. Shauna Ayers and Catherine Cruz Agosto guide you through the challenges of data quality and apply a structured approach to analyze, measure, test, and monitor living data sets, and gauge the business impact of data quality issues.

T18 Testing as a Service (TaaS): A Solution to Hard Testing Problems

Scott Tilley, Florida Institute of Technology

Thu, 05/07/2015 - 1:30pm

Some problems in software testing seem timeless. Other challenges—including SOA and cloud computing—arise due to the introduction of new technologies. Scott Tilley has led a three-year project at the Florida Institute of Technology to identify hard problems in software testing as voiced by leading practitioners in the field. The problems were identified through a series of workshops, interviews, and surveys.

T20 Virtualization to Improve Speed and Increase Quality

Clint Sprauve, HP

Todd DeCapua, HP

Thu, 05/07/2015 - 3:00pm

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 describes how service virtualization and network virtualization can help your team improve speed and increase quality.

Keynotes

K4 Blunders in Test Automation

Dorothy Graham, Software Test Consultant

Thu, 05/07/2015 - 8:30am

In chess, the word blunder means a very bad move by someone who should know better. Even though functional test automation has been around for a long time, people still make some very bad moves and serious blunders. The most common misconception in automation is thinking that manual testing is the same as automated testing. And this thinking accounts for most of the blunders in system level test automation.