STARWEST 2018 - Test Automation
Wednesday, October 3
7 Proven Ways to Ruin Your Test Automation
PreviewTest automation projects fail, but why? Could you stop it from happening? In this tongue-in-cheek talk, Seretta Gamba will share seven proven methods to disrupt or utterly ruin a test automation project, including letting a lone champion keep important knowledge to himself, ignoring good programming practices, setting impossible goals, and feigning support. Seretta’s humorous recommendations will provide managers, testers, and automators alike with the early signs of an automation project in danger. By “warning” that the most effective defenses are found using the test automation...
No More Shelfware—Let’s Drive
When Isabel Evans learned to drive a car, she also learned how to check, clean, and change spark plugs, mend the fan belt with a stocking, and indicate speed and direction changes with arm and hand signals. Now, we don’t expect to have to do any of those things; we just drive the car. That’s how test tools and automation could be. Just drive and concentrate on the journey of delivering software continuously—concentrate on engineering the solutions, not on the automation. To be effective engineers, we need the support of a powerful toolset that we understand. Is that what we have? Or do we...
Automation and Test Strategies to Save Our Project from the Brink of Collapse
Teams are sometimes asked to turn a mess of undocumented, poorly structured legacy code into a robust product under impossible deadlines. Test strategies blending automation, exploration, and refactoring can help focus development efforts and converge even the most chaotic projects. But, where do you start? Join Jonathan Solórzano-Hamilton as he shows how automation can help drive products into a state of release readiness. Learn how refactoring, test-driven development, SOLID principles, dependency injection, and mocking frameworks help break down complex development problems into...
Thursday, October 4
Frontend Testing: Stepping in and Collaborating with Developers
Testing is shifting left, moving closer to testing the code itself before the full product is ready for release. While the backend world already has established methodologies for testing, frontend developers and testers are still trying to figure out how to work together to effectively test the code. Gil Tayar suggests testers need to communicate with the frontend developers to understand the framework by which frontend code is tested, the various kinds of testing that can be performed on frontend code, and which tools can be used. During this session, Gil helps ease your fear of the...
Mission Critical Automation Testing
When critical subsystems fail, the resulting losses can be catastrophic. In the insurance industry, if premiums are miscalculated, defect costs can reach well over a million dollars. In this session, Mike Keith and Dom Nunley draw on their practical experience with insurance systems testing to provide an overview of combinatorial automation testing for high-risk backend system areas—i.e., features that absolutely must work correctly. They share a process for categorizing requirement risk levels to determine which requirements warrant combinatorial testing. Mike and Dom illustrate various...
An Innovative Test Automation Approach without Making Test Cases
Does test automation need traditional test cases? Mehmet Duran says no. Using the open source tool TESTAR, he devised an innovative approach to automated testing. Join Mehmet as he shares the research he conducted to solve this challenge and how he confirmed his findings by comparing test approaches using a new framework with the quality attributes of learnability and usability. Mehmet will also describe he worked with Hatim Chahim of Prorail on a real-world railroad project to try out his theory. After applying the framework, results showed that within this setting, the test automation...
Everything I Learned about Automation, I Learned from Saturday Morning Cartoons
Do you remember sitting in front of the television as a kid enjoying your favorite Saturday morning cartoons? Chris Loder shows you how the lessons we learned from those cartoons apply to our everyday work in test automation. Wait until you hear what we’ve learned from the likes of Scooby Doo®, Wile E. Coyote®, and many other favorites! Like Bugs Bunny®, maybe we should “have taken that left turn at Albuquerque” and possibly done things a little differently. Discover how the animators in Spiderman® didn’t redraw every background but reused the animation cells, similar to our reusing pieces...