TTA in Discuss Agile Day Pune

I spoke in Discuss Agile Day, Pune on 22nd Nov on "To Deploy, or Not To Deploy - Decide using TTA's Trend & Failure Analysis".

Below are the details of the talk:

Abstract

In a fast-moving environment, where Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) are a necessity and not a luxury, how can teams decide if a product is ready to be deployed to the next environment and go 'live'?

What is the health of your product portfolio at any point in time?
Can you identify patterns over a period of time in making better decisions to better the quality of your product(s)?
Test Automation across all layers of the Test Pyramid enables to get quick feedback about the health of the product-under-test.

However, in an organization having multiple products in its portfolio, how can you get the collated quality / health information from all the products, quickly and in real-time? Or, for a large program of work, which has various projects being worked on in parallel by numerous teams across the world, how can the relevant people quickly get the consolidated quality / health information for the whole program?

In such cases, how can you:
- figure out any Trends / Patterns in the quality, or,
- do any meaningful Comparative Analysis (say between the quality of last release Vs the next release), or,
- do quick Failure Analysis and prioritize the 'fixing' of issues in an efficient fashion, and,
- do some quick Functional Performance Benchmarking.

At present this needs to be done manually.
Learn an effective way to answer the above questions - with TTA (Test Trend Analyzer), an open source product.

TTA give you real-time and visual insights into the health of the product portfolio using the Test Automation results. This allows teams to take decisions on the product deployment to the next level using actual data points, instead of 'gut-feel' based decisions.

Slides from the talk

To Deploy or Not-To-Deploy - decide using TTA's Trend & Failure Analysis from Anand Bagmar

Some pictures from the conference

 

Good Trends for TTA in DevOps Summit

I spoke in DevOps Summit on 8th Oct in Bangalore on "To Deploy, or Not To Deploy - Decide using TTA's Trend & Failure Analysis".

The conversations during and after this talk with various veterans in the Software Industry, across various different domains; reiterated my belief in the need for me to spend more time in taking TTA to the next level and make it a more robust and feature-rich product.

Below are the details of the talk:

Abstract

In a fast-moving environment, where Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) are a necessity and not a luxury, how can teams decide if a product is ready to be deployed to the next environment and go 'live'?

What is the health of your product portfolio at any point in time?
Can you identify patterns over a period of time in making better decisions to better the quality of your product(s)?
Test Automation across all layers of the Test Pyramid enables to get quick feedback about the health of the product-under-test.

However, in an organization having multiple products in its portfolio, how can you get the collated quality / health information from all the products, quickly and in real-time? Or, for a large program of work, which has various projects being worked on in parallel by numerous teams across the world, how can the relevant people quickly get the consolidated quality / health information for the whole program?

In such cases, how can you:
- figure out any Trends / Patterns in the quality, or,
- do any meaningful Comparative Analysis (say between the quality of last release Vs the next release), or,
- do quick Failure Analysis and prioritize the 'fixing' of issues in an efficient fashion, and,
- do some quick Functional Performance Benchmarking.

At present this needs to be done manually.
Learn an effective way to answer the above questions - with TTA (Test Trend Analyzer), an open source product.

TTA give you real-time and visual insights into the health of the product portfolio using the Test Automation results. This allows teams to take decisions on the product deployment to the next level using actual data points, instead of 'gut-feel' based decisions.

Slides from the talk

To Deploy or Not-To-Deploy - decide using TTA's Trend & Failure Analysis from Anand Bagmar

Video from the talk

 

 

Agile Testing in Singapore

As part of Next Generation Testing Leadership ASIA-PAC Summit, I will be doing a 1-day workshop on Agile Testing on Monday, 19th October 2015 in Singapore. Below are the details for the same. Also, I will be speaking on "What is Agile testing? And How Does Automation Help" on Tuesday, 20th October 2015. Do let me know if you are interested in attending the same.

Agile Testing Workshop

The Agile Manifesto was published in 2001. It took the software industry a good few years to truly understand what the manifesto means, and the principles behind it. However, choosing and implementing the right set of practices to get the true value from working the Agile way has been the biggest challenge for most!

While Agile has now gone mainstream, and as we get better at the development practices to being Agile, Testing has still been lagging behind in most cases. A lot of teams are still working in the staggered fashion - with testing following next after development completed.

In this workshop, we will learn and share various principles and practices which teams should adopt to be successful in testing on Agile projects. 

Agenda :

• What is Agile testing? - Learn what does it mean to Test on Agile Projects
• Effective strategies for Distributed Testing - Learn practices that help bridge the Distributed Testing gap!
• Test Automation in Agile Projects - Why? What? How? - Why is Test Automation important, and how do we implement a good, robust, scalable and maintainable Test Automation framework!
• Build the "right" regression suite using Behavior Driven Testing (BDT) - Behavior Driven Testing (BDT) is an evolved way of thinking about Testing. It helps in identifying the 'correct' scenarios, in form of user journeys, to build a good and effective (manual & automation) regression suite that validates the Business Goals.

Key Learnings for participants in this workshop :

• Understand the Agile Testing Manifesto
• Learn the essential Testing practices and activities essential for teams to adopt to work in Agile way of working
• Discover techniques to do effective testing in distributed teams
• Find out how Automation plays a crucial role in Agile projects
• Learn how to build a good, robust, scalable and maintainable Functional Automation framework
• Learn, by practice, how to identify the right types of tests to automate as UI functional tests - to get quick and effective feedback

Pre-requisites :

• Basic working knowledge and understanding of Agile

Selenium Conference 2015 - it simply came, and went so fast

Its been a crazy summer - the 2nd week of September 2015 just amplified that…

A good few months ago we - the Selenium Conference Planning Committee started on the journey of planning this years Selenium Conference 2015. We started with debating where to have this years conference, till Portland magically came up on the radar, and became a reality. We met over Google Hangout every 2 weeks initially, and then as we got closer to the date, every week.

Can’t believe as I am writing this post, the conference is already over (a couple of weeks ago) …

The team put in a lot of hard work - me doing the least of that … and the turnout (approx 500 people), the interactions and the quality of talks proves the hard work paid dividends.

I traveled from Pune, India on 5th Sept at around 6pm headed to Portland, Oregon. The journey - from home to the hotel took approximately 35 hours.

After crazy 4 days, and a total of around 25-30 hours of sleep in 5 nights (thanks to the jet lag), and having delivered 3 talks as well, it was another 35 hour trip back home ... the only good thing after this hectic trip - I never got adjusted to the US time zone - which meant no jet-lag when I came back home :) This was a first for me :)

Slides & Videos from Selenium Conference 2015:

All the slides and videos for all the talks are available here.

Below is the list of my talks:

To Deploy or Not-to-Deploy - decide using TTA's Trend & Failure Analysis

I got a lot of very good feedback for this talk, and also quite a few people expressed interest in trying it out! Looking for feedback from their experiences!


Video of the talk is available on YouTube here:

Slides are available here:

To Deploy or Not-To-Deploy - decide using TTA's Trend & Failure Analysis from Anand Bagmar

Automate across Platform, OS, Technologies with TaaS

This topic is so relevant with anyone working in large enterprises, or when it is being "mandated" to work on a common test automation framework.

Video of the talk is available here:

Slides are available here:

Integration Testing in Enterprises using TaaS from Anand Bagmar

Say ‘No’ to (more) Selenium Tests

I paired with Bhumika on this talk. We were very agile in preparing for this talk - a day in advance to be precise. Also, it was very bold topic to have in a Selenium Conference - standing in front of 200+ Selenium enthusiasts, and telling them - do NOT write more Selenium tests. But went pretty well ... given that we were able to walk on our own feet out of the room, and that people were able to get the message we were trying to deliver :D

Video of the talk is available here:

Slides are available here:

Say NO To (More) Selenium Tests from Anand Bagmar

Patterns in Test Automation

I spoke in vodQA Hyderabad on Sat, 22nd August 2015 about Patterns in Test Automation - Frameworks, Data & Locators.

The slides are available on SlideShare:

Patterns in Test Automation from Anand Bagmar

The video is available on YouTube:

Abstract

Building a Test Automation Framework is easy - there are so many resources / guides / blogs / etc. available to help you get started and help solve the issues you get along the journey.

However, building a "good" Test Automation Framework is not very easy. There are a lot of principles and practices you need to use, in the right context, with a good set of skills required to make the Test Automation Framework maintainable, scalable and reusable.

Design Patterns play a big role in helping achieve this goal of building a good and robust framework.

In this talk, we will talk about, and see examples of various types of patterns you can use for:

• Build your Test Automation Framework
• Test Data Management
• Locators / IDs (for finding / interacting with elements in the browser / app)

Using these patterns you will be able to build a good framework, that will help keep your tests running fast, and reliably in your CI / CD setup!

Learning outcome

• Patterns for building Test Automation Framework
• Patterns for Test Data Management, with pros and cons of each
• Patterns for managing locators / IDs for interaction with UI

Client-side Performance Testing workshop video

As mentioned here, I conducted a Client-side Performance Testing workshop in TechJam.

It was a full house, and almost turned into a flop show because there was no wifi available - an essential requirement for the workshop. There were 2 things that saved me:
1. The attendees, thankfully (in this case) did not read the prerequisites well - most of them came without a laptop
2. Because of the above, I could get by using a 3G USB connection and just do a demo of the tools I wanted to show.

End of the day, all was good. I got good feedback from the participants that they really enjoyed the workshop, and it was very informative and useful. (Thank you all again for the kind words!)

Below is the video from the workshop.

The slides are available here:

Client-Side Performance Testing from Anand Bagmar

Agile Testing - Metrics can be fun too!

Metrics are meaningless unless in the right context. In this case, my "right" context is purely a "feel-good-factor". 

In April 2011, I published the "Agile QA Process" paper on SlideShare. I am very happy to see it has received over 30000 views and has been downloaded over 1400 times!

On a similar note, I created a mindmap for Test Insanse - titled - "Agile QA - Capabilities & Skills". That also seems to be hitting a good note - with almost 1000 views in under 25 days!

So in this case - Metrics are fun! I don't mind this ego boost to continue writing more, and sharing more!

Experiences from "Agile Testing" workshop

As mentioned in this post, I conducted an "Agile Testing" workshop on 24th July 2015.

Here are the slides from the workshop:

• What is Agile testing? - Learn what does it mean to Test on Agile Projects

What is Agile Testing? from Anand Bagmar

• Effective strategies for Distributed Testing - Learn practices that help bridge the Distributed Testing gap!

Strategies for Distributed Agile Testing from Anand Bagmar

• Test Automation in Agile Projects - Why? What? How? - Why is Test Automation important, and how do we implement a good, robust, scalable and maintainable Test Automation framework!

Test automation - What? Why? How? from Anand Bagmar

• Build the "right" regression suite using Behavior Driven Testing (BDT) - Behavior Driven Testing (BDT) is an evolved way of thinking about Testing. It helps in identifying the 'correct' scenarios, in form of user journeys, to build a good and effective (manual & automation) regression suite that validates the Business Goals.

Build the "right" regression suite using Behavior Driven Testing (BDT) from Anand Bagmar

Its all about Testing in vodQA Hyderabad

It's all about Testing! at vodQA Hyderabad is being scheduled for Sat, 22nd Aug 2015 at ThoughtWorks, Hyderabad.

Speaker registrations are now open and Attendee registrations will open soon.

I will be there, looking forward to seeing you there as well!

Automating Look & Feel, along with Functional validation

Typically we automate the validation of functionalities - using various options and approaches based on the Test Automation Pyramid. However, there are various reasons why one may want to automate the Look & Feel of their application (web / native)

This post is not about if or when we should automate the Look & Feel aspects of the product. This post assumes you have done the discussions, evaluations and validations required to reach the decision that, yes, we need to automate the Look & Feel of the product under test. 

The next question is - how? What are the alternatives of accomplishing this type of automation?

If you need basic validation, there is an open-source alternative - where you can do Visual Testing and Validations using PhantomCss. Vishnu & Shridhar spoke about this in vodQA Pune - Innovations in Testing. See the slides and videos from their awesome session.

If you need more flexibility and functionality from the Look & Feel automation, and want to do this for cross-browser / multiple devices, then I recommend you look at Applitools Eyes product. I had have seen a couple of demos from Moshe and Adam about this product - and they were kind to record one of the demos and allow me to share it with all - you can see the demo here on youtube.

Applitools has a free account for individuals, with of course, certain limitation in usage (not functionality). You can sign-up for your account here and try it out.

Client-side Performance Testing Workshop in TechJam, 13th August 2015

I am conducting a Client-side Performance Testing workshop in TechJam on Thursday, 13th August 2015.

You can register for the same from the TechJam page.

Abstract

In this workshop, we will see the different dimensions of Performance Testing and Performance Engineering, and focus on Client-side Performance Testing.

Before we get to doing some Client-side Performance Testing activities, we will first understand how to look at client-side performance, and putting that in the context of the product under test. We will see, using a case study, the impact of caching on performance, the good & the bad! We will then experiment with some tools like WebPageTest and Page Speed to understand how to measure client-side performance.

Lastly - just understanding the performance of the product is not sufficient. We will look at how to automate the testing for this activity - using WebPageTest (private instance setup), and experiment with yslow - as a low-cost, programmatic alternative to WebPageTest.

Expected Learnings

1. What is Performance Testing and Performance Engineering.
2. Hand's on experience of some open-source tools to monitor, measure and automate Client-side Performance Testing.
3. Examples / code walk-through of some ways to automate Client-side Performance Testing.

Prerequisites

1. Participants are required to bring their own laptop for this workshop.
2. Also, please install phantomJS on your machine (http://phantomjs.org/download.html)