Speaking schedule in the past year, and crazy July 2023!

I am writing on my blog after a very long time ... Don't remember the last time I wrote a post. So what has happened in the past 6-12 months?

Thanks to the wonderful conference and meetup organizers, I have traveled a lot for the following:

• DevOps Days 2022 @Switzerland
• Meetup @New York
• Meetup @Boston
• Selenium Conf 2023 @Chicago,
• Meetup @Sydney,
• Testing Talks 2022, Melbourne
• StarEast 2023, Orlando

I also spoke at many meetups and events in Gurgaon, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Mumbai and Pune.

I also spoke in some very interesting webinars in this time. The ones that surprised me the most because of the huge popularity and turnouts were:

• Unlocking the Power of ChatGPT and AI in Testing: A Real-World Look
• Unlocking the Power of ChatGPT and AI in Test Automation: Next Steps

While doing this, I have been contributing to open-source - teswiz and AppiumTestDistribution are the big noteworthy items. Recent work has been to support Selenium WebDriver v4 and Appium 2.0 in these frameworks.

Now in July 2023, this is the scheduled lineup of events (with dates, location and topics):

• Saturday, 8 July 2023 - A modern look at AI-powered Cross Browser Testing at Game of Testing, Bangalore
• Thursday, 13th July 2023 - Can AI Autogenerate and Run Automated Tests? - An Applitools webinar.
• Monday, 17th July 2023 - Visual Validation - The missing tip of the automation pyramid & and A modern look at AI-powered Cross-Browser Testing at Gentrack Testing Meet Up, Auckland, NZ.
• Thursday, 20th July 2023 - Unlocking the Power of ChatGPT and AI in Testing & Test Automation, at the Software Test Automation Group (STAG) meetup, Melbourne, Australia.
• Monday, 24th July 2023 - Eradicate Flaky Tests and Automating the real-user scenarios across multi-apps, and multi-devices, at All Things Testing Brisbane, Australia.
• Wednesday, 26th July 2023 - Power your Automation using AI, at Testing Talks Sydney Australia.
• Thursday, 27th July 2023 - Metrics to measure the effectiveness of your engineering processes, practices, and implementation, at ITMA-Applitools event, Singapore.

Agile Testing & Patterns for a good Test Automation Frameworks

2018 started with a bang! I got an opportunity to speak and share my experiences in 2 rocking meetups.

Patterns of a "good" Test Automation Framework

TechnoWise meetup on 13th Jan on Patterns of a "good" Test Automation Framework went very well, with lot of interaction and discussions along the way.

Patterns of a “good” test automation framework from Anand Bagmar

What is Agile Testing? How does Automation Help?

Then, there was an impromptu meetup setup by a very proactive ISQA community at GO-JEK office in Jakarta, Indonesia on 16th Jan. The topic there was What is Agile Testing? How does Automation help? In this meetup, I also covered aspects of Career Path of a Tester, and QA Skills and Capabilities.

There were many amazing experiences from this meetup -

• The ISQA community is very active. The meetup was setup in literally a few days and there were over 150+ attendees
• The GO-JEK office space is a very fun place. They actually have an auditorium in the office to host meetups and similar activities, apparently, once a week!!
• The questions / interactions with the attendees were very insightful

Here are slides shared in the meetup. I will share the link of the video as well once available.

What is Agile Testing? How does Automation help? from Anand Bagmar

vodQA Pune - Less Talk, Only Action!

Very happy to announce the next edition of vodQA - 'Less Talk, Only Action!' with focus on hands-on activities. 

You are required to register & submit for this vodQA edition by filling in the below google form - https://goo.gl/forms/We3002DOlkQXmPsN2

There are limited seats for the workshops, available on first-come-first-served basis. 

NOTE: For this event, we will require the participants to get their laptops (and chargers).

When? 

Saturday, 27th Aug 2016, 8.30am - 5.30pm

Where? 

ThoughtWorks, Pune 
6th Floor, Binarius Building, 
Beside Sales Tax Office, Shastrinagar, Yerawada 
Pune, Maharashtra 411006 

Map: 

http://goo.gl/maps/KfuJG

What?

vodQA Pune - Less Talk, Only Action! 
- Registration - 8.30am- 9.15am
- Welcome note - 9.15am

Topics covered: 

This vodQA will focus on hands-on activities. We are setting up a bunch of workshops for participants, please keep a watch for details and pre-requisites required for the workshops.

We will publish the agenda very soon in vodQA groups on 
Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/groups/vodqa/) and 
LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/groups/4281359)

NOTE: For this event, we will require the participants to get their laptops (and chargers).

Agenda will be published soon.

Update & Learning from Webinar on Test Automation - Principles & Practices

On request from a very enthusiastic Tester - Buddhini from Sri Lanka, I did a webinar for the Sri Lanka Testing Community on - "Test Automation - Principles & Practices".

Below is the flyer they created.



This was a different type of webinar - with all attendees in Sri Lanka in one room, and me, the presenter, speaking over GoToMeeting from ThoughtWorks Pune, India.

The only thing that did not work out well - was the interactions - which was expected anyway - since the speaker and the attendees were not really face-2-face in the same room. Also, it was unfortunate - that the Internet connection was not the best - hence could not really hear any question / comments what the attendees were asking. That said, the attendees were very responsive - and thanks to video enabled, we could use visual gestures to keep track and have simple yes / no type of interactions.

The slides used during the talk can be seen below.

Test Automation - Principles and Practices from Anand Bagmar

Lastly, there were some questions that were asked by attendees during registration / talk. I will do a followup post with my answer to these. In the meantime, please post more questions, if at all, in the comments section.

• What is the best way we can use to do Load testing? If it is for Java projects then can we use Java Thread classes or is Jmeter a good tool to use? If so how can we use Jmeter tool in a better way? What are the good tools to do performance testing?

• Is it a good practice to automate GUI of the screens or should we always automate server side testing?

• Is Perl a good interpreter to test server side testing? If it is not then what are the good tools we can use?

• Is selenium a good tool to automate the functionality? Are there any other tools?

• How to build an automation framework?

• Are there any other open source tools for Desktop applications (other than Sikuli and AutoIT)?

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" workshop in July

[UPDATE] I think I will include some interesting Innovation Games to demonstrate the need for collaboration and more effective working. Or it could be something more specific to Testing on Agile projects. So many options ... 

---------------------------------

As part of Unicom's World Conference Next Generation Testing, I am doing a 1-day workshop on "Agile Testing", on Friday, 24th July 2015 in Bangalore. You can register for the workshop from here, or contact me for more information.

Below are the details of the workshop. 

Agile Testing

Abstract

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

• At-least a basic working knowledge and understanding of Agile

vodQA Pune - Innovations in Testing

vodQA Update - Agenda + Slides + Videos

Here is an update of the vodQA that went by at supersonic speed!

We had an intense and action-packed vodQA in ThoughtWorks, Pune on Saturday, 6th June 2015 - with the theme - Innovations in Testing!

Here are some highlights from the event:

• You can find the details of the agenda + links to slides & videos from here or here.
• After a record breaking attendee registrations (~500), we frantically closed off registrations. This meant around 140-180 people would show up based on historic attendance trends. 135 attendees made it to vodQA - the first person reaching office at 8.30am - when the event was supposed to start at 10am! That is enthusiasm!
• We had 45+ speaker submissions (and we had to reject more submissions because the registrations had already closed). After speaking to all submitters, and a lot of dry-runs and feedback, we eventually selected 6 talks, 4 lightning talks, 4 workshops from this massive list.
• We were unfortunately able to select only 2 external speakers (but it was purely based on the content + relevance to the theme). One of these speakers travelled all the way from Ahmedabad to Pune on his own for delivering a Lightning Talk.
• We had a few ThoughtWorkers travelling from Bangalore (2 speakers + 1 attendee) and 1 (speaker) from Gurgaon
• We had around 30-40 ThoughtWorkers participating in the conference. 
• No event in the office can be possible without the amazing support from our Admin team + support staff!
• Overall - we had around 200 people in the office on a Saturday!
• For the first time, we did a live broadcasting of all the talks + lightning talks (NO workshops). This allowed people to connect with vodQA as it happened. Also - usually the last and most cumbersome thing from a post-event processing - uploading videos - was now the the first thing that was completed. See the videos here on youtube. This update got delayed because we still have to get the link to the slides :(
• We celebrated the 5th Birthday of vodQA!
• Even though most projects in TW Pune are running at 120+% delivery speed, we were able to pull this off amazingly well! This can only happen when individuals believe in what they are contributing towards. Thank you all!
• We wrapped up most of the post-event activities (office-cleanup, retro, post-vodQA dinner and now this update email) within 5 days of the vodQA day - another record by itself!
• Some pictures are attached with this email.

You can see the tweets and comments in the vodQA group on facebook. 

Again, A HUGE THANKS to ALL those who participated in any way!

On behalf of the vodQA team + all the volunteers!

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[UPDATE]

Detail agenda, with expected learning and speaker information available here (http://vodqa-pune.weebly.com/agenda.html) for vodQA Pune - Innovations in Testing.

NOTE;
- Each workshop has limited # of seats.
- Registration for workshop will be done at the Attendee Registration Desk between 9am-10am on vodQA day.
- Registration will be on first-come-first choice basis.
- See each talk / workshop details (below) for pre-requisites, if any.


----------------

vodQA is back in ThoughtWorks, Pune on Saturday, 6th June 2015. This time the theme is - "Innovations in Testing".

We got a record number of submissions from wannabe speakers and HUGE number of attendee registrations. Selecting 12-14 talks from this list was no small task - but we had to take a lot of tough decisions.

The agenda is now published (see here - http://vodqa-pune.weebly.com/agenda.html) and we are looking forward to have a very rocking vodQA!

vodQA Geek Night in ThoughtWorks, Hyderabad - Client-side Performance Testing Workshop

I am conducting a workshop on "Client-side Performance Testing" in vodQA Geek Night, ThoughtWorks, Hyderabad from 6.30pm-8pm IST on Thursday, 14th May, 2015.

Visit this page to register!

Abstract of the workshop:

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.

Venue:

ThoughtWorks Technologies (India) Pvt Ltd.
3rd Floor, Apurupa Silpi,
Beside H.P. Petrol Bunk (KFC Building),
Gachibowli,
Hyderabad - 500032, India 

e: info-in@thoughtworks.com 
t: +91 40 4388 4100

View map

Push the Envelope at vodQA, Bangalore

[UPDATED - Slides added]

Yet another vodQA begins today, Saturday, 25th April 2015 - this time at ThoughtWorks, Bangalore. The theme for this vodQA is - "Push the Envelope". The detail agenda can be found here.

I conducted a workshop on "Client-side Performance Testing" in vodQA Bangalore. 

Abstract of the workshop:

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.

Here are the slides used in the workshop:

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

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.

Start 2015 by Celebrating Selenium in vodQA Hyderabad

ThoughtWorks, Hyderabad is proud to host its first vodQA, also the first vodQA of 2015 and start 10 Years of Selenium Celebration. This event will be held on Saturday, 31st Jan 2015.

Look at the agenda of this vodQA and register soon. Given that we have mostly workshops in this vodQA, seats are going to be limited!

Here is the address and direction to the ThoughtWorks office.

UPDATE:

Slides for my talk on the "Future of Testing, Test Automation and the Quality Analyst" are now available here:

vodQA - Breaking Boundaries in Pune

[UPDATE] - The event was a great success - despite the rain gods trying to dissuade participants to join in. For those who missed, or for those who want to revisit the talks you may have missed, the videos have been uploaded and available here on YouTube.

[UPDATE] - Latest count - >350 interested attendees for listening to speakers delivering 6 talks, 3 lightning talks and attending 3 workshops. Not to forget the fun and networking with a highly charged audience at the ThoughtWorks, Pune office. Be there, or be left out! :)


I am very happy to write that the next vodQA is scheduled in ThoughtWorks, Pune on 15th November 2014. The theme this time around is "Breaking Boundaries".

You can register as an attendee here, and register as a speaker here. You can submit more than one topic for speaker registration - just email vodqa-pune@thoughtworks.com with details on the topics.

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.

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.

 

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.

WAAT at StarEast2014

I was speaking about "Build the 'right' regression suite using Behavior Driven Testing (BDT)" at StarEast 2014 and met Marcus Merrell who was speaking about "Automated Analytics Testing with Open Source Tools". I figured out deep into our conversation that he has used WAAT, and a few others at the table also were aware of and had used WAAT before. Felt great!

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!