End-to-End Automated Testing: Lessons from Zombieland
With the proliferation of mobile devices, browsers, and IoT devices, each with its own eccentricities, performing end-to-end automated testing is starting to feel like navigating a zombie apocalypse. You need to fight off the zombies but lack the right tools. You need a set of rules to live by. You wish you had a buddy who would teach you all those rules because alone, you feel like you’re being eaten alive. On the surface, the rules are simple—Limber Up, Don’t Be a Hero, Travel Light, and Check the Backseat. When applied to automated testing, these rules provide you the tools you need to live a happy life in a world of uncertainty. Matt Barbour shares how you can adapt the rules from the movie Zombieland to make your end-to-end tests highly efficient and provide meaningful business value—all while reducing the amount of overhead needed to maintain them.
The director of test engineering at the Comcast Silicon Valley Innovation Center, Matt Barbour has served in a number of engineering roles at the company since 2007. He and his teams are responsible for ensuring a top notch customer experience at Comcast’s large scale for set-top boxes, mobile devices, and browsers. Matt is a primary maintainer of a number of repositories on Github including Zucchini which enables highly concurrent Cucumber testing and Magic-Wand which takes all the complexity out of creating a Selenium test environment. Matt and his family live happily in zombie-free Half Moon Bay, CA.