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

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

Enabling CD & TTA in Discuss Agile 2015

I had the opportunity to speak in Discuss Agile Delhi 2015 on 2 topics.

Here are the details on the same:

Enabling Continuous Delivery (CD) in Enterprises with Testing

Abstract:

The key objectives of any organization is to provide / derive value from the products / services they offer. To achieve this, they need to be able to deliver their offerings in the quickest time possible, and of good quality!

In such a fast moving environment, CI (Continuous Integration) and CD (Continuous Delivery) are now a necessity and not a luxury!

There are various practices that organizations need to implement to enable CD. Changes in requirements (a reality in all projects) needs to be managed better. Along with this, processes and practices need to be tuned based on the team capability, skills and distribution.

Video:

Slides:

Enabling CD in Enterprises with Testing from Anand Bagmar

To Deploy, or Not to Deploy? Decide using Test Trend Analyzer (TTA)

Abstract:

The key objectives of organizations is to provide / derive value from the products / services they offer. To achieve this, they need to be able to deliver their offerings in the quickest time possible, and of good quality!

In order for these organizations to to understand the quality / health of their products at a quick glance, typically a team of people scramble to collate and collect the information manually needed to get a sense of quality about the products they support. All this is done manually.

So in the fast moving environment, where CI (Continuous Integration) and CD (Continuous Delivery) are now a necessity and not a luxury, how can teams take decisions if the product is ready to be deployed to the next environment or not?

Test Automation across all layers of the Test Pyramid is one of the first building blocks to ensure the team gets quick feedback into the health of the product-under-test.

The next set of questions are:
    •    How can you collate this information in a meaningful fashion to determine - yes, my code is ready to be promoted from one environment to the next?
    •    How can you know if the product is ready to go 'live'?
    •    What is the health of you product portfolio at any point in time?
    •    Can you identify patterns and do quick analysis of the test results to help in root-cause-analysis for issues that have happened over a period of time in making better decisions to better the quality of your product(s)?

The current set of tools are limited and fail to give the holistic picture of quality and health, across the life-cycle of the products.

The solution - TTA - Test Trend Analyzer

TTA is an open source product that becomes the source of information to give you real-time and visual insights into the health of the product portfolio using the Test Automation results, in form of Trends, Comparative Analysis, Failure Analysis and Functional Performance Benchmarking. 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:

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

What is Agile Testing? How does Automation help?

I spoke in a conference recently on "What is Agile Testing? How does Automation help?"

Abstract

Agile Methodology is not new. Many organisations / teams have already adopted Agile way of Software Development or are in the enablement journey for the same. 

What does this mean for Testing? There is no doubt that the Testing approach and mindset also needs to change to be in tune with the Agile Development methodology. 

Learn what does it mean to Test on Agile Projects. Also, learn how Test Automation approach needs to change for the team to be successful!

Video

Slides

What is Agile Testing? How does Automation Help?

Here I am on the stage, in Main Hall, in front of 150+ people, delivering the talk - What is Agile Test? How does Automation Help?:

Role of Automation in Testing

I am speaking in Discuss Agile 2015 conference on 13-14 June 2015 on the following topics - 

1. To Deploy or Not-to-Deploy - decide using TTA's Trend & Failure Analysis
2. Enabling Continuous Delivery (CD) in Enterprises with Testing

As part of this conference, I also did an interview with Saket Bansal and Atulya Mishra on - The Role of Automation in Testing.

This was an interesting, virtual interview - where interested people had asked questions during registration, and also a lot of questions came up during the interview.

Below is the video recording of the interview. 

I also referenced some slides when speaking about some specific topics. Those can be seen below, or directly from slideshare.

Enabling CD & BDT in March 2015

I have been very busy off late .... and am enjoying it too! I am learning and doing a lot of interesting things in the Performance Testing / Engineering domain. I had no idea there are so many types of caching, and that there would be a need to do various different types of Monitoring for availability, client-side performance testing, Real User Monitoring, Server-side load testing and more ... it is a lot of fun being part of this aspect of Testing.

That said, I am equally excited about 2 talks coming up in the end-of-March 2015:

Enabling CD (Continuous Delivery) in Enterprises with Testing 

- at Agile India 2015, on Friday, 27th March 2015 in Bangalore.

Abstract

The key objectives of Organizations is to provide / derive value from the products / services they offer. To achieve this, they need to be able to deliver their offerings in the quickest time possible, and of good quality!
In such a fast moving environment, CI (Continuous Integration) and CD (Continuous Delivery) are now a necessity and not a luxury!

There are various practices that Organizations and Enterprises need to implement to enable CD. Testing (automation) is one of the important practices that needs to be setup correctly for CD to be successful.

Testing in Organizations on the CD journey is tricky and requires a lot of discipline, rigor and hard work. In Enterprises, the Testing complexity and challenges increase exponentially.

In this session, I am sharing my vision of the Test Strategy required to make successful the journey of an Enterprise on the path of implementing CD.

Build the 'right' regression suite using Behavior Driven Testing (BDT) - a Workshop

- at vodQA Gurgaon, on Saturday, 28th March 2015 at ThoughtWorks, Gurgaon.

Abstract

Behavior Driven Testing (BDT) is a way of thinking. 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. We will learn about BDT, do some hands-on exercises in form of workshops to understand the concept better, and also touch upon some potential tools that can be used.

Learning outcomes

• Understand Behavior Driven Testing (BDT)
• Learn how to build a good and valuable regression suite for the product under test
• Learn different style of identifying / writing your scenarios that will validate the expected Business Functionality
• Automating tests identified using BDT approach will automate your Business Functionality
• Advantages of identifying Regression tests using BDT approach

Experiences from webinar on "Build the 'right' regression suite using Behavior Driven Testing (BDT)"

I did a webinar on how to "Build the 'right' regression suite using Behavior Driven Testing (BDT)" for uTest Community Testers on 18th Feb 2015 (2pm ET).

The recording of the webinar is available here on utest site (http://university.utest.com/recorded-webinar-build-the-right-regression-suite-using-behavior-driven-testing-bdt/).

The slides I used in the webinar can be seen below, or available from slideshare.

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

Here are some of my experiences from the webinar:

• It was very difficult to do this webinar - from a timing perspective. It was scheduled from 2-3pm ET (which meant it was 12.30-1.30am IST). I could feel the fatigue in my voice when I heard the recording. I just hope the attendees did not catch that, and that it did not affect the effective delivery of the content.
• There were over 50 attendees in the webinar. Though I finished my content in about 38-40 minutes, the remaining 20 minutes was not sufficient to go through the questions. The questions itself were very good, and thought provoking for me.
• A webinar is a great way to create content and deliver it without a break - as a study material / course content. The challenge and the pressure is on the speaker to ensure that the flow is proper, and the session is well planned and structured. Here, there are no opportunities to tweak the content on the fly based on attendee comments / questions / body language.
• That said, I always find it much more challenging to do a webinar compared to a talk. Reason - in a talk, I can see the audience. This is a HUGE advantage. I can understand from their facial expressions, body language if what I am saying makes sense or not. I can have many interactions with them to make them more involved in the content - and make the session about them, instead of me just talking. I can spend more time on certain content, while skipping over some - depending on their comfort levels. 

vodQA Cocktail - early in 2015

As we get ready for Celebrating Selenium's 10 year journey in vodQA Hyderabad, ThoughtWorks Chennai is ready to take vodQA to the next level on Saturday, 21st February, 2015 with an interesting Cocktail of topics related to Software Testing.

Register here as a speaker for vodQA Chennai, or here as an attendee.

To Deploy or Not to Deploy - decide using Test Trend Analyzer (TTA) in AgilePune 2014

I spoke on the topic - "To Deploy or Not to Deploy - decide using Test Trend Analyzer (TTA)" in Agile Pune, 2014.

The slides from the talk are available here, and the video is available here.



 

Below is some information about the content.


The key objectives of organizations is to provide / derive value from the products / services they offer. To achieve this, they need to be able to deliver their offerings in the quickest time possible, and of good quality!
In order for these organizations to to understand the quality / health of their products at a quick glance, typically a team of people scramble to collate and collect the information manually needed to get a sense of quality about the products they support. All this is done manually.

So in the fast moving environment, where CI (Continuous Integration) and CD (Continuous Delivery) are now a necessity and not a luxury, how can teams take decisions if the product is ready to be deployed to the next environment or not?

Test Automation across all layers of the Test Pyramid is one of the first building blocks to ensure the team gets quick feedback into the health of the product-under-test.

The next set of questions are:

• How can you collate this information in a meaningful fashion to determine - yes, my code is ready to be promoted from one environment to the next?
• How can you know if the product is ready to go 'live'?
• What is the health of you product portfolio at any point in time?
• Can you identify patterns and do quick analysis of the test results to help in root-cause-analysis for issues that have happened over a period of time in making better decisions to better the quality of your product(s)?

The current set of tools are limited and fail to give the holistic picture of quality and health, across the life-cycle of the products.
 
The solution - TTA - Test Trend Analyzer
 
TTA is an open source product that becomes the source of information to give you real-time and visual insights into the health of the product portfolio using the Test Automation results, in form of Trends, Comparative Analysis, Failure Analysis and Functional Performance Benchmarking. This allows teams to take decisions on the product deployment to the next level using actual data points, instead of 'gut-feel' based decisions.
 
There are 2 sets of audience who will benefit from TTA:
1. Management - who want to know in real time what is the latest state of test execution trends across their product portfolios / projects. Also, they can use the data represented in the trend analysis views to make more informed decisions on which products / projects they need to focus more or less. Views like Test Pyramid View, Comparative Analysis help looking at results over a period of time, and using that as a data point to identify trends.
 
2. Team Members (developers / testers) - who want to do quick test failure analysis to get to the root cause analysis as quickly as possible. Some of the views - like Compare Runs, Failure Analysis, Test Execution Trend help the team on a day-to-day basis.
 
NOTE: TTA does not claim to give answers to the potential problems. It gives a visual representation of test execution results in different formats which allow team members / management to have more focussed conversations based on data points.

Some pictures from the talk ... (Thanks to Shirish)

Perspectives on Agile Software Testing

Inspired by Selenium's 10th Birthday Celebration, a bunch of ThoughtWorkers have compiled an anthology of essays on testing approaches, tools and culture by testers for testers.  
This anthology of essays is available as an ebook, titled - "Perspectives on Agile Software Testing" which is now available for download from here on ThoughtWorks site. A simple registration, and you will be able to download the ebook. 

Here are the contents of the ebook:

Enjoy the read, and looking forward for the feedback.

Enabling Continuous Delivery (CD) in Enterprises with Testing

I spoke about "Enabling Continuous Delivery (CD) in Enterprises with Testing" in Unicom's World Conference on Next Generation Testing. 

I started this talk by stating that I am going to prove that "A Triangle = A Pentagon". 

A Triangle == A Pentagon??

I am happy to say that I was able to prove that "A Triangle IS A Pentagon" - in fact, left reasonable doubt in the audience mind that "A Triangle CAN BE an n-dimensional Polygon".
Confused? How is this related to Continuous Delivery (CD), or Testing? See the slides and the video from the talk to know more.

This topic is also available on ThoughtWorks Insights.

Below are some pictures from the conference.

To Deploy or Not to Deploy - decide using Test Trend Analyzer (TTA)

[UPDATE: 18th July 2014] I spoke on the same topic - "To Deploy or Not to Deploy - decide using Test Trend Analyzer (TTA)" at Unicom's World Conference on Next Generation Testing in Bangalore on 18th July 2014. The slides are available here and the video is available here. In this talk, I also gave a demo of TTA.
 
I spoke in 3 conferences last week about "To Deploy or Not to Deploy - decide using Test Trend Analyzer (TTA)"

You can find the slides here and the videos here:

• Hyderabad - 14th June 2014
  
• Chennai - 17th June 2014
• Delhi - 19th June 2014

Here is the abstract of the talk:

The key objectives of organizations is to provide / derive value from the products / services they offer. To achieve this, they need to be able to deliver their offerings in the quickest time possible, and of good quality. To understand the quality / health of their products at a quick glance, typically a team of people scramble to collate and collect the information manually needed to get a sense of quality about the products they support. All this is done manually. So in the fast moving environment, where CI (Continuous Integration) and CD (Continuous Delivery) are now a necessity and not a luxury, how can teams take decisions if the product is ready to be deployed to the next environment or not? Test Automation across all layers of the Test Pyramid is one of the first building blocks to ensure the team gets quick feedback into the health of the product-under-test.
 
The next set of questions are:
    •    How can you collate this information in a meaningful fashion to determine - yes, my code is ready to be promoted from one environment to the next?
    •    How can you know if the product is ready to go 'live'?
    •    What is the health of you product portfolio at any point in time?
    •    Can you identify patterns and do quick analysis of the test results to help in root-cause-analysis for issues that have happened over a period of time in making better decisions to better the quality of your product(s)?
 
The current set of tools are limited and fail to give the holistic picture of quality and health, across the life-cycle of the products.
 
The solution - TTA - Test Trend Analyzer
 
TTA is an open source product that becomes the source of information to give you real-time and visual insights into the health of the product portfolio using the Test Automation results, in form of Trends, Comparative Analysis, Failure Analysis and Functional Performance Benchmarking. This allows teams to take decisions on the product deployment to the next level using actual data points, instead of 'gut-feel' based decisions.

Future of Testing, Test Automation and The Quality Analyst

In this edition of vodQA - "Let your testing do the talking" at ThoughtWorks, Bangalore, I spoke on what I think is the "Future of Testing, Test Automation and the Quality Analyst". 

The slides from the talk are available here and the video is available here.

Watch out for updates from other exciting and intriguing talks from this edition of vodQA.

Below are some pictures from my talk. 

Join the vodQA group on facebook to keep updated on upcoming vodQA events and happenings.

 

Anna Royzman speaks on encouraging women in Testing and more ...

The next part of the Disruptive Testing series is out - this time read thought-provoking insights by Anna Royzman on topics like - how to encourage more women in Testing, changing role of a Tester, importance of role models and mentors in the profession, and more.

Let your testing do the talking

The next edition of vodQA is here - on 21st June 2014 at ThoughtWorks, Bangalore. The theme of this event is "Let your testing do the talking".

To attend, you can register here.

See you on 21st June.

Update from StarEast 2014 - "Build the 'right' regression suite using BDT"

I had a great time speaking about how to "Build the 'right' regression suite using Behavior Driven Testing (BDT)".

This time, I truly understood the value of practice, dry-runs. Before the webinar for NY Selenium Meetup group, I presented the content to my colleagues in the ThoughtWorks, Pune office and also shared the same with the hivemind @ ThoughtWorks and got great feedback. That helped me tremendously in making my content more rock-solid and well-tuned.

As a result, I was able to deliver the content, to a very enthusiastic and curious audience, who turned up in great numbers (>105) to hear about what the $@$#^$% is BDT, and how can it help in avoiding the nightmare of long, unfruitful, painful Regression Test cycles.

The slides from the talk are available here and the video is available here.

Update from Webinar on "Build the 'right' regression suite using BDT" for NY Selenium Meetup

I had a challenging, yet good time speaking in a Webinar for the New York Selenium Meetup community on how to "Build the 'right' regression suite using Behavior Driven Testing (BDT)". This webinar was conducted on 6th May 2014 at 6.30pm and I am very thankful to Mona Soni to help organize the same.

Before I speak about the challenges, here are the slides and the audio + screen recording from the webinar. The video is not cleaned-up ... I had started recording the session and then we did wait for a few minutes before we started off, but you can forward to around the 01:15 min mark and audio starts from that point.

This was challenging because of 2 main reasons:
> With a webinar, I find it difficult to connect with the audience. I am not able to gauge if the content is something they already know about, so I can proceed faster. Or, if they are not following, I need to go slower. Or, the topic is just not interesting enough to them. There may be other reasons as well, but I just do not get that real-time feedback which is so important when explaining a concept and a technique.
Though there were some good interactions and great questions in form of chat, I miss that eye-to-eye connect. This webinar was conducted using GoToMeeting. Maybe next time I do this, I need to try to get webcams enabled for atleast a good few people attending to understand that body language.

> The 2nd challenge I had was purely my own body not being able to adjust well enough. I had flown in from India to Florida to speak in STAREAST 2014 conference just a couple of days ago, and was still adjusting to the jet-lag. Evening times turned out to be my lowest-energy points on the day and I felt myself struggling to keep focus, talk and respond effectively. I would like to apologize to the attendees if they felt my content delivery was not up to the mark for this reason.

I appreciate any feedback on the session, and looking forward to connect with you and talk about Testing, Test Automation, my open-source tools (TaaS, WAAT, TTA) and of course BDT!

Disruptive Testing - An interview with Matt Heusser

Read an interview with Matt Heusser to know what he thinks about Lean Software Testing, Scaling Agile, Testing Metrics, and other thought provoking questions.

Automate across Platform, OS, Technologies with TaaS

[Updated - link to slides, audio, experience report added]

The talk at Agile India 2014 went really well. A few things happened:

• My talk was the 2nd last talk on a Saturday. My hopes of having a decent sized audience was low. But I was very pleasantly surprised to see the room almost full.
• Usually in conferences I have spoken at, the ratio of technical / hands-on people Vs leads / managers is around 20:80. In this case, that ratio was almost inverted. There were about 70-80% technical / hands-on people in the audience.
• Due to the higher technical audience, there were great questions all along the way - which resulted in me not able to complete on time ... I actually went over by 5-6 minutes and that too had to really rush through the last few sections of my presentation, and was not able to do a complete demo.
• Almost everyone was able to relate to the challenges of integration test automation, the concept and the problem TaaS solves - which was a great validation for me!
• Unfortunately I had to rush to the airport immediately after the talk, which prevented me from networking and talking more specifics with folks after the talk. Hopefully some of them will be contacting me to know more about TaaS!

The slides from the talk are available here on slideshare. You can download the audio recording from the talk from here. The pictures and video should be available from Agile India 2014 site soon. I will update the links for the same when that becomes available.

--------

After what seems to be a long time, I am speaking in Agile India 2014 in Bangalore on  "Automate across Platform, OS, Technologies with TaaS".

I am changing the format of the talk this time and am hoping to do a good demo instead of just showing code snippets. Hopefully no unpleasant surprises crop up in the demo!! 

Other than that, really looking forward to interacting with a lot of fellow-enthusiasts at the conference.

Slides and experience report to follow soon.