STARWEST 2017 - Test Automation
Wednesday, October 4
Blunders in Test Automation
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. Dorothy Graham takes us on a tour of these blunders, including: the Stable-Application Myth (you can’t start automating until the application is stable), Inside-the-Box Thinking (...
Transform Your Team from QA to Test Engineering
PreviewAre you being asked to shorten your testing timelines? Do you feel pressured to increase your test automation coverage but don’t have the time, staff, or budget? How do you as a leader upgrade your existing teams’ programming skills and technical abilities without bringing in external resources—and still meet your daily release deliverables? Join Jennifer Scandariato as she shares her journey in transforming the QA department at iCIMS into a Test Engineering Center of Excellence, where manual testers are now automation engineers who apply appropriate automation technologies to...
Test Automation for Data-Centric Applications
Test automation, one of several key technical enablement practices, allows teams to be more successful in their agile journeys. Although there are many test practices and automation tools available for software development teams to leverage, few data-centric testing tools are targeted to data-related development and testing, leaving data warehousing and business intelligence teams thinking they can't possibly automate their tests. Cher Fox explores why test automation is important to agile data teams, discusses why they aren’t automating their tests today, and investigates the path to test...
Thursday, October 5
Use Automation to Assist—Not Replace—Manual Testing
PreviewAutomation is a powerful tool to help testing but too often it is used to replicate existing manual tests. This leads organizations to spend large amounts of time and money constantly updating flaky automated tests and test teams to suffer frustration from having to focus on activities that are not truly testing. This cost and frustration can be avoided by using automation as a tool to assist testing—not to replace tests. Jeffrey Martin shares some real-world examples of using automation to supplement testing by leveraging its true value—the replication and repetition of tasks...
Say Goodbye to Flaky Selenium Tests
PreviewSelenium has an industry reputation of being a “flaky” tool where individual tests pass, then fail—sometimes with no production changes at all. Such flakiness in your test suites can be extremely difficult, time consuming, and frustrating to debug. The vast majority of these issues stem from using either bad locators or bad wait conditions. But both of these root causes can be addressed by implementing the right framework for your Selenium tests. Craig Schwarzwald shares the most important concepts in creating such a Selenium framework. He has proved that using a framework...
Integrate Your Test Automation Tools for More Power
PreviewWalk the Expo, and you will see all kinds of test automation tools. Some run scripts. Some communicate with the system under test. Some virtualize system components. Some do interesting things that you may never have considered. Yet, none gives you a complete recipe for testing your product and synthesizing the results. That is not their job. It's yours. Mike Duskis says an effective test automation program will reflect the unique nuances of your product and your business. However, unique nuances need not add up to radically different architectures. In fact, effective automation...
The Pothole of Automating Too Much
Is your company spending a lot of time and effort on an automation strategy while your customers believe that product quality has not improved? Does management see automation as a silver bullet that will save money, increase coverage, and reduce headcount? Do you work for a company where the goal is (almost) 100 percent test automation? Paul Holland discusses issues and problems with these approaches and perceptions about test automation. He provides strong arguments why the “automate everything” approach is not likely to be successful and provides details of an alternative, balanced...