Seretta Gamba

Steria Mummert ISS GmbH

Seretta Gamba has more than thirty years’ experience in software development and testing. As test manager at Steria Mummert ISS GmbH, Seretta was charged with improving their test automation process. After studying other strategies, she developed command-driven testing and a supporting framework. Seretta presented an enhancement to the framework that enabled the test automation team to “harvest” test case information by supporting manual testing. A description of this experience became a chapter in Experiences of Test Automation by Dorothy Graham and Mark Fewster.

Speaker Presentations

Monday, October 13, 2014 - 1:00pm

Half-day Tutorials

Test Automation Patterns: Issues and Solutions SOLD OUT

Automating system level test execution can result in many problems. It is surprising to find that many people encounter the same problems yet are unaware of common solutions that 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 Mark Fewster, has organized them into Test Automation Patterns. Although unit test patterns are well known, Seretta’s and Mark’s patterns address more general issues. They cover management, process, design, and execution patterns to help you recognize common test automation issues and show you how to identify appropriate patterns to solve the problems. Issues such as No Previous Automation, High ROI Expectations, and High Test Maintenance Cost are addressed by patterns such as Maintainable Testware, Tool Independence, and Management Support.

Bring your laptop to gain access to an offline version of the wiki during the tutorial.

Thursday, October 16, 2014 - 3:00pm

Test Automation

The Doctor Is In: Diagnosing Test Automation Diseases

When doing test automation, you sometimes notice that things are not working out as expected, but it’s not clear why. You are so caught up in the day-to-day work that you don't see the bigger picture. It’s like when you get sick―you know something is wrong, but you don’t know what. That’s the time to visit a doctor. Doctors diagnose diseases mainly by asking questions. First, they get a general idea of what’s wrong; then the questions become more and more specific; and in the end, they identify the disease and prescribe the appropriate cure. This method also works well for test automation. By first asking general questions, and then more and more specific ones, you can identify the disease (the issue) and then it’s relatively simple to select the most appropriate remedy. Seretta Gamba demonstrates this method with examples of common automation diseases and suggests the appropriate patterns to cure them.