STAREAST 2016 - Test Automation
Sunday, May 1
Integrating Test with a DevOps Approach (2–Day)
Real-World Software Testing with Microsoft Visual Studio® (3–Day)
Mastering HP LoadRunner® for Performance Testing (2–Day)
Fundamentals of Agile Certification—ICAgile (2–Day)
Monday, May 2
Testing the Internet of Things
The Internet of Things (IoT) is the next big technology challenge for software testing. IoT testing uses not only concepts from traditional and mobile environments but also has new testing problems and new patterns. Jon Hagar begins by examining how to use data analytics from error profiles and social media to discover the new error patterns in IoT systems. Usage data on IoT devices is growing rapidly and becoming a big data issue. Through hands-on exercises, Jon explains how teams can use data analytics to improve development and testing. Next, he uses the analytics to define real-world...
Plan, Architect, and Implement Test Automation within the Lifecycle
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 no consideration for how to integrate those tools. 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. Mike discusses both the good (engaging the technical architecture team) and the bad (too much isolation between test automators and test designers) on his...
Test Automation Strategies for the Agile World
With the adoption of agile practices in many organizations, the test automation landscape has changed. Bob Galen explores current disruptors to traditional automation strategies, and discusses relevant and current adjustments you need to make when developing your automation business case. Open source tools are becoming incredibly viable and beat their commercial equivalents in many ways―not only in cost but also in functionality, creativity, evolutionary speed, and developer acceptance. Agile methods have fundamentally challenged our traditional automation strategies. Now we must keep up...
Successful Test Automation: A Manager’s View
Many organizations never achieve the significant benefits that are promised from system level automated test execution. Surprisingly often, this is due not to technical factors but to management issues. In this overview, Dot Graham describes the most important management issues you must address for test automation success, particularly when you are in the early stages of automation, and helps you understand and choose the best approaches for your organization—no matter which automation tools you use. Focusing on...
Service Virtualization: Making the Unavailable Available for Testing
Service virtualization—and how it can help testers begin testing earlier—is a hot topic in books and discussions. Now it’s time to demonstrate how service virtualization is more than just a buzzword. Join Carlos Pineda for this interactive session as he shares his experiences and proven practices for using service virtualization technology. Learn how to get started with service virtualization, how service virtualization fits into the overall delivery lifecycle, how to prioritize which services to stub out, and when to begin transitioning from testing with stubs to executing the real...
Tuesday, May 3
The Challenges of BIG Testing: Automation, Virtualization, Outsourcing, and More
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 techniques like keyword testing and behavior-driven development. Discover what roles virtualization and...
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. Many believe it is a “must have” skill for test engineers. If you want to learn Selenium, then this 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, work with...
Technical Test Automation Challenges: Patterns and Solutions
Many organizations find that test automation does not work as well as they thought it would. In many cases, these failures are due to technical reasons, which can be fixed relatively easily. These test automation patterns are common to automation efforts at any level with whatever tools you are using. Dorothy Graham focuses on often-neglected technical issues—things that are not management issues—and the patterns that help solve them. Using a set of patterns developed...
Performance Testing: Planning for a Successful Test
In today’s fast paced, ever changing world of software and technology, software performance testing is becoming essential to successful product implementation. To be successful we must understand several fundamental factors about performance testing. Dale Perry examines the activities required to be successful in software performance testing. Dale identifies key issues, how they determine our level of success at implementing the necessary testing, and potential pitfalls...
Testing Cloud Services
Cloud computing is rapidly changing the way systems are developed, tested, and deployed. New system hosting capabilities—software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS)—are forcing us to review and revise our testing processes. At the same time, cloud computing is affording us opportunities to employ new test tooling solutions, which we call testing as a service (TaaS). In this technical session, Martin Pol and Jeroen...
Wednesday, May 4
Open Source Test Automation: Riding the Second Wave
After the first wave of open source test automation tools like Fitnesse and Watir, we are now in a stronger, second wave led by Selenium-based frameworks. This powerful swell, fueled by a major shift toward web-based applications on desktops and mobile devices, is changing how corporations tackle software test automation. Add in a desire to replace old-guard, commercial tools in favor of newer technology with lower costs, we may have a perfect storm. However, with different technologies come new challenges....
Acceptance- and Behavior-Driven Development with Cucumber: Three Case Studies
Acceptance test-driven development (ATDD), behavior-driven development (BDD), and Cucumber promise many benefits related to your user story acceptance tests. They promise tighter collaboration between the product owner and the team. They promise the ability for the product owner and other stakeholders to write their own executable acceptance tests. They even promise an increase in the value produced by the efforts of your team as they focus on building the “right”...
Anti-Patterns for Automated Testing
Patterns—proven, repeatable solutions to common situations that occur again and again—are commonly used in development and to a lesser extent in testing. In addition to patterns, various anti-patterns have been discovered. These are common responses to recurring problems that, while promising, are actually counterproductive. Hans Buwalda describes a set of such anti-patterns that he commonly sees in automated test design and that he feels inhibit scalability and...
Helpful Practices in Agile Testing
“Testing” in an agile environment is much different from classic testing on waterfall projects. Testers must be involved in all aspects of software development. Jeroen Mengerink shows you how professional testers can become key contributors in agile projects. First, he explains how to pair with and help the members of your agile team by identifying the test skills each of them needs to learn for the team to create a better quality product. Because agile development starts with user stories, there is an increased importance of end-to-end testing. Jeroen shows how to use mind mapping to...
How HP Enterprise Implemented DevOps Processes
Within large enterprise organizations, DevOps transformations can be daunting and complex if not implemented with innovation, creativity, and the support of leadership. Implementing DevOps best practices can be a challenge, even for those companies that sell software that addresses this particular discipline. Imagine approaching a team that develops quality assurance tools and challenging them to build a developer-centric team for continuous testing and delivery—but you can't use any of your own tools. Join Clint Sprauve and Eran Bachar to learn how Eran created a dev/test team to...
From Zero to Hero in 205 Days!
As test managers, we face challenging situations that require us to draw on our past experiences, principles, and good practices in order to have any chance at all for success. Michael Wasielczyk faced this challenge immediately after joining T. Rowe Price. He started his new job, responsible for managing the testing effort on a mission-critical data warehouse, and he had no experience managing a data warehouse testing effort. In addition, Michael found there were no...
Continuous Integration Testing Techniques to Improve Chef Cookbook Quality
Chef, Puppet, and other tools that implement “infrastructure as code” are great for configuration management and automated deployments, but it is difficult to test these infrastructure scripts before putting them into production. Since infrastructure as code is a relatively new technology, methodologies for its testing are not yet standardized. Glen Buckholz shares a way to solve the two major problems with testing Chef scripts—[1] capturing a start state similar to your...
Fostering Long-Term Test Automation Success
In today’s environment of plummeting software delivery cycle times, test automation becomes a more critical and strategic necessity. How can we possibly keep up with software delivery's explosive pace while retaining satisfactory test coverage? How do we keep the reins on costs and reduce risk? Carl Nagle maintains that the long-term solution is a greater level of “sustainable” test automation. The Software Automation Framework Support (SAFS) method separates test...
Thursday, May 5
Analyze, Diagnose, and Prevent Test Flakiness
Test code development is generally approached with more lenient standards and less scrutiny than production code. As a result, rather than providing valuable feedback on software quality, this can lead to tests that produce inconsistent results and false outcomes. Team productivity is affected since executing, debugging, and fixing unreliable tests results in a substantial waste of time. Join Dionny Santiago as he describes how to transition from flaky, unreliable tests...
Turbocharge Your Automation Framework to Shorten Regression Execution Time
Asad Faruqui and Moni Mau say that their old regression automation used to take three-to-four days of execution time as they ran against different browser versions, locales, and currencies. They wanted to make the automation framework more efficient so features could go to market faster. Symantec explored Selenium Grid which could reduce the run time by offering some parallelism, but Asad and Moni wanted even more efficiency. They explain how they created both a...
Build a Cross-Department DevOps Team
Who owns DevOps? That's a question that many are asking as more and more organizations implement continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous monitoring capabilities—the essence of DevOps engineering. Join Jeffery Payne as he describes how leading-edge organizations are structuring cross-department DevOps teams and where those teams live within existing organizational structures. Learn who needs to be involved in a DevOps team, how the team works with...
Combine Test Automation Code with Product Code: The Good, the Bad, and the Lessons Learned
At STAREAST 2015, Chris Loder spoke about the automation framework that he and his team built at Halogen Software. At the time, they had just moved the test automation code into the development code base so that everyone in R&D was able to use it. One year later, Chris returns to...
Cross-Platform Mobile Test Automation Using Appium
Mobile devices are taking over the world and quickly outpacing the use of traditional desktop machines. But how should we test them? Jonah Stiennon has spent the past two years working with a team of open source contributors at Sauce Labs to establish Appium as the industry standard for cross-platform mobile test automation. A Node.js application, Appium uses a superset of the JSON wire protocol, the same protocol on which Selenium is built, to automate both iOS and...
Boost Test Coverage with Automated Visual Testing
Joe Colantonio shares how combining your existing automated tests with scalable automated visual testing can help you dramatically increase coverage, reduce maintenance, and substantially boost test robustness, efficiency, and ROI. Joe includes real-life use cases—automating cross-browser UI validation, adding full UI regression coverage to existing automated tests, handling dynamic content in visual tests, and more—to help you release faster and better, automatically...
The Selenium Grid: Run Multiple Automated Tests in Parallel
The Selenium Grid unleashes the full power of Selenium to run multiple automated tests in parallel across multiple platforms. Brian Long demonstrates the use of an open-source framework developed at Virginia Tech to get up and running with a Selenium Grid in about an hour. He begins by discussing the Selenium Grid configuration and then progresses to the installation of the framework. Starting with a clean Selenium installation, Brian uses Git to retrieve and install...
Stay Ahead of the Mobile and Web Testing Maturity Curve
Join Danny McKeown, Paychex’s lead test enterprise automation architect, to learn how to climb the testing maturity curve and increase predictability and reuse, all while accelerating repeatable and reliable testing. Learn how Paychex iteratively built a well-defined web and mobile app test automation architecture. By evolving the areas of strategy, environment pre-conditions, continuous integration, and understanding their IT users, Paychex executes a mature program...
Git and GitHub for Testers
GitHub is the repository for the vast majority of today’s open-source software. And that is why many interviewers look at applicants’ public GitHub.com accounts to assess their interests, popularity, helpfulness, and consistency. To collaborate with developers, today’s testers need git and a GitHub account. Unfortunately, esoteric command lines often confuse those new to the tool. Join Wilson Mar as he provides advice on how to be immediately productive. He begins with...
Don’t Be Another Statistic! Develop a Long-Term Test Automation Strategy
Choosing the appropriate tool and building the right framework are typically thought of as the main challenges to successful test automation. However, even after careful tool selection and advanced automation framework construction, many find long-term success elusive. Lee Barnes discusses the key strategy components that must be in place to avoid becoming another test automation statistic. Learn the importance of—and techniques for—assessing your organization’s...
Build a Quality Engineering and Automation Framework
How would you like to be in this position? Development sends the final release candidate for multiple systems with a user base of one million just a day before the production release, and you are expected to sign off on the overall software quality. Rahul Shah is responsible for providing QA sign-off for a dozen applications every week and is accountable for reporting the overall quality of functional, regression, automation, cross-browser, mobile, and performance testing...
Evolve or Die: What Testers Need to Do to Survive and Thrive
With the advent of new technologies, agile methodologies, innovative tools, and a global workforce, the tester’s role is rapidly changing. Those who can adapt to the changing environment get the best jobs and assignments, and others get left behind. As the discipline of testing evolves, test professionals have to make decisions that will determine their success and job satisfaction. Is it better to specialize or be a generalist? Are you a better fit for a small start-up or...