STARWEST 2017 - Test Automation Engineer

Selenium expertise, 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 tool 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 JavaScript...

In the tradition of James Whittaker’s book series, How to Break Software, Jon Hagar applies the testing “attack” concept to mobile and embedded software systems. First, Jon defines the environments of mobile and embedded software. He then examines the issues of software product failures caused by defects found in these types of software. Next, Jon shares a set of attacks against mobile and embedded software based on common modes of failure that teams can direct against their software. Like different kinds of software design patterns, attacks are test design patterns that must be...

To be most effective, test managers must develop and use metrics to help direct the testing effort and make informed recommendations about the software’s release readiness and associated risks. Because one important testing activity is to “measure” the quality of the software, test managers must measure the results of both the development and testing processes. Collecting, analyzing, and using metrics are complicated because many developers and testers are concerned that the metrics will be used against them. Join Mike Sowers as he addresses common metrics—measures of product...

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 that must be made when developing an automation business case. Open source tools are becoming incredibly viable and often best their commercial equivalents―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 with...

As testers, we know that we can define many more test cases than we will ever have time to design, execute, and report. The key problem in testing is choosing a small, “smart” subset—from the almost infinite number of tests available—that will find a large percentage of the defects. Join Lee Copeland to discover how to design test cases using formal black-box techniques, including equivalence class testing, boundary value testing, decision tables, and state-transition diagrams. Explore examples of each of these techniques in action. Don’t just pick test cases randomly. Learn to selectively...

Let’s face it—agile testing is different. Challenges exist in successfully integrating within the teams themselves. Scrummerfall continues to run rampant. The dichotomy of testing v. quality and balancing both the team’s and your focus still exists. Delivering value is both an imperative and a challenge. In this dynamic workshop, join agile coaches Mary Thorn and Bob Galen to explore the tools, techniques, and mindset you must bring to the table to successfully test in agile contexts. Mary and Bob examine risk-based testing, iterative test planning, exploratory testing, agile automation...

Today’s software applications are often security critical, making security testing essential in a software quality program. Unfortunately, most testers have not been taught how to effectively test the security of the software applications they validate. Join Jeffery Payne as he shares what you need to know to integrate effective security testing into your everyday software testing activities. Learn how software vulnerabilities are introduced into code and exploited by hackers. Discover how to define and validate security requirements. Explore effective test techniques for assuring that...

Imagine this … As soon as any developed functionality is submitted into the code repository, it is automatically subjected to the appropriate battery of tests and then released straight into production. Well, setting up the pipeline capable of doing just that is becoming more and more common. But most organizations hit the same stumbling block—just what IS the appropriate battery of tests? Automated build architectures don't always lend themselves well to the traditional stages of testing. In this hands-on tutorial, Melissa Benua introduces you to key test design principles—applicable to...

Today, many agile organizations are making a terrible error. They are assuming there is no place for test management and leadership in agile, self-directed team contexts. Mary Thorn and Bob Galen beg to differ with this view and believe a strong need exists for testing leadership in agile organizations—just not the way we’ve typically approached it. Join Mary and Bob as they explore what excellent test team leadership looks like in agile contexts. Explore the aspects of self-directed teams and the implications to your previous leadership styles. Look under the covers of Scrum and see where...

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. Join Jeffery Payne as he discusses the unique challenges associated with integrating automated testing into continuous integration/...

Are you a tester, developer, or quality engineer who participates in code reviews or unit testing activities? Can you write test scripts to cover all program statements but would like to learn more advanced code-based testing techniques? Join Tariq King as he goes beyond the basics of unit testing and shows you how to design tests that cover multiple data conditions, independent paths, and loops within code. Learn how to apply these techniques to different application tiers, ranging from the user interface to the data access layer. Discover strategies for integration testing based on...

The DevOps movement is here. Now, companies with mature systems are breaking down siloed IT departments and federating them into product development teams and departments. Testing and its practices are at the heart of these changes. Traditionally, development organizations have been filled with mostly manual testers and a limited number of automation and performance engineers. Adam Auerbach says this has to change. To keep pace with development in the new “you build it, you own it” environment, testing teams and individuals must develop new technical skills and even embrace coding to stay...

Mike Cohn’s Test Pyramid describes a test automation strategy consisting of a wide base of unit tests, service-oriented acceptance tests for business logic, and a thin layer of tests exercising the user interface. Tests that provide the quickest feedback and fault precision serve as the testing foundation. So, how does this work in practice? How does a team achieve this level of test automation and maintain it over time? How can the team avoid redundancy in the various test layers? Jim Weaver demonstrates the different types of tests for a real feature—enforcing business rules for...

Do you ever sit in test strategy or test plan review sessions and get little or no participation from others? Are you looking for a better way to communicate important information around the test plan or strategy? Do you want your stakeholders to understand and engage in providing feedback and suggestions? Jennifer Bonine and Karen Schaefer have a solution for you—a mind mapping tool that can help you address these questions. A Mind Map is a visual approach used to help organize information rather than a text outline or list. Jennifer and Karen will help you download a free mind mapping...

Service virtualization provides many benefits for both development and test teams. For testers, service virtualization empowers them to work in parallel with their development counterparts and take control of their own schedules. They no longer have to wait for development to complete their work or to get access to a restricted system such as a mainframe or a third party API. Test teams can get the basic details from dev and/or use a sample request and response pair to create a virtual service themselves. With no need to wait on others to start testing, testing can start at...

Mary Thorn has had the opportunity in the past twenty years to work at many startups, creating several QA/test departments from scratch. For the past ten years, she has done this in agile software companies. Recently Mary moved from leading small agile test organizations to leading a large agile test organization where she has learned how to lead agile testers and agile testing in large contexts. Mary takes you through what she has learned, identifies the keys to transitioning your test organization as it grows, and discusses the techniques required to lead it through the changes. Agile...

A lot of folks doing testing (QAs, BAs, and Devs alike) are experienced with testing applications through the front end—a graphical user interface or a mobile app. However, Hilary Weaver-Robb says that with this type of testing we often miss the internal web services and APIs that power those applications. Integration or web service tests are right in the middle of the Testing Pyramid, so to ensure adequate coverage it’s vital for testers to know how to test at that level. Thankfully, to test web services we can apply many of the same principles we already know. Hilary focuses on...

You may have heard the term “continuous testing” and thought it was just the DevOps flavor of the month … or that it isn’t part of DevOps … or that it isn’t for cloud-based applications. Marianne Hollier says that continuous testing means adopting the right set of automated tests along with service virtualization, which allows the team to simulate missing dependencies and to start testing earlier and more frequently. She shares how the right combination of best practices and tools can help software development and testing teams adopt a continuous testing approach. Since you can’t test...

Sabermetrics turned the baseball world upside down by challenging decades-old measures of individual performance and their perceived linkage to team success. After cementing their legacy as the Lovable Losers for 108 years, the Chicago Cubs were able to leverage a data-driven approach to finally win a World Series. A high-school football coach, devoted to statistical analysis, has won three state championships—by never punting. Formula 1 racing teams collect staggering amounts of telemetry data from their race cars for the purpose of eking out seconds during the course of a race....

Automation 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...

The concept of “shifting testing left” in the software development lifecycle is not new. Shifting testing from manual to automated and then upstream into engineering is a driving factor in DevOps and agile software development. However, Michael Nauman wonders why test automation, DevOps, and agile software development still frequently fail to deliver on their promises? Aligning and hardening your DevOps and test automation—along with streamlining your agile processes—is critical to your project. Michael shares how AutoCAD’s shifting testing left enabled improvements within their...

Selenium 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...

Communication breakdowns are a primary cause of IT project failure. Marcia Buzzella believes increasing the success rate of IT projects across waterfall, Agile, and DevOps methods requires a balance of social (soft) and technical (hard) capabilities to improve team performance. Social interactions among team members facilitate knowledge sharing, build relationships, promote trust, and—perhaps most importantly—align expectations. Unfortunately, the fast pace of technological change prompts many software test professionals to prioritize the improvement of technical capabilities over...

Ensuring a website will scale with excellent performance under peak levels of load is no easy task. Any number of problems can occur—from switch hardware failure to third party service outages, to a poor choice of algorithms or memory use in the code. Melissa Chawla describes Shutterfly's three-tiered approach to prevent site outages during peak load. First, check the development team's designs for scalability by holding performance design reviews for each project including identifying throughput requirements for all down-stream resources. Second, automate continuous load testing...

The age of the Internet of Things (IoT) has come. IoT devices enable a new realm of services and applications—medical devices, fitness and fashion, appliances, industrial, etc. The market is expected to exceed $1.7 trillion by 2020 with more than 200 billion connected devices—and 90 percent of automobiles. Join Amir Rozenberg as he describes the ingredients to ensure quality IoT applications: IoT-enabled lab, test tools and methodologies, and compliance and test evidence. Test professionals need to expand their perspective to include IoT; new IoT dev testers need to adopt proven...

Even seemingly simple software systems can be a dense forest of intersecting logical pathways which may leave you wondering if your testing was robust enough. Traditional test cases are flawed since they only execute the pathways the tester considered at the time the test case was written, and they will execute the same way—every time and without variation. Jon Fetrow shows how, using model-based testing, you can create a map of your software forest and answer the question “Did you test enough?” Jon discusses the use of models to catch defects in the requirements and design phase...

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...

To be a well-rounded and analytical tester, Adam Satterfield says you should learn to code. Learning to code empowers a tester to be more self-reliant and less dependent on someone else to write their test scripts, which can take valuable time from the critical and time-crunched testing process. Learning to code positions a tester for long-term career growth, opens up new professional opportunities, and gives them the perspective to be a better tester with a deeper understanding of what questions to ask and how to approach a meaningful testing plan to gain better insights. However...