Test Automation Pyramid

 

Patterns in Test Automation presented at Agile India 2016

I spoke about Patterns of a “good” Test Automation Framework, Locators & Data! in Agile India 2016 in front of a packed room of Developers, Testers, BAs and POs.

Below is the abstract, slides & video of the talk.

Patterns of a “good” Test Automation Framework, Locators & Data!

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:

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

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

Slides

Slides are available here:

Patterns in Test Automation from Anand Bagmar

Video

(My attempt of capturing the) video is available here:

Official video will be linked when it gets available.

The story of a 'small' vodQA ending up being 'x-large'

We are extremely happy to start the new year with YASV (Yet Another Successful vodQA) event, this time with the theme - Agile Testing Workshop, conducted on 9th January 2016 in ThoughtWorks, Pune office.

Why the theme - "Agile Testing Workshop"?

Over the past few years, after having worked on numerous projects, interacted with a lot of clients (and their partners / vendors), and gaining insights from speaking with individuals & teams in conferences & organizations, we (the vodQA Pune team), realized that a decent portion of the Software (testing) Industry lacks decent / good understanding of Agile and effective Testing on Agile projects / teams.

So, we decided to conduct the next vodQA in Pune - focussed on Agile Testing to answer questions like - "What is Agile and what does it mean to Test on Agile projects / teams?"

Highlights

• When we started planning for this edition of vodQA, the plan was to keep it very lean - in planning, execution and participation as well. For this, we planned to keep this vodQA 'small'. Little did we realize it would end up being a patiala peg.

• What started out as an event aimed at 30 attendees soon shot up to 180+ RSVPs on Facebook to 160+ confirmations and eventually we had 85+ attendees. Including ThoughtWorkers, we (again) crossed 100+ people for vodQA Pune! - There went a lot of our 'being-lean' out of the window!

• This event was completely driven by the Facebook group (from announcements to registrations to updates).

• We had a quite a few attendees travel from out of Pune for vodQA (ex: Mumbai, Nagpur)

• This was one of the most vocal, enthusiastic and interactive audience vodQA Pune has seen. They shared their experiences and asked a lot of questions as well.

• True to our objective for this vodQA, we ensured there was sufficient time between sessions / workshops to facilitate discussions and answer specific questions from the attendees.

• We had impromptu fishbowl discussion on certain Parking Lot questions.

• After the first session of the day (Agile Game), the attendees celebrated (it was over) by bursting the balloons - early Diwali some would say … :)

• You can see the tweets, comments in the vodQA group on Facebook and pictures here.

• A huge shoutout to the organisers who were constantly tweaking their execution methods, days before the event as our expected turnout gradually rose from 30 to 100+.

Agenda and Slides

Topic	By	Slides
Welcome note	Anand Bagmar
Agile Game	Abhay Dalvi, Vardhan Bhatt & Vikrant Chauhan
Tea break
What is Agile Testing?	Amit Gundiyal & Prasad Kalgutkar	http://www.slideshare.net/vodqanite/what-is-agile-testing-56891493
Effective Strategies for Distributed Testing	Preeti Mishra	http://www.slideshare.net/vodqanite/strategies-for-distributed-testing
Lunch
Testing the Mysterious Sphere	Anjali Wadhwa, Ashwini Ingle & Preeti Mishra	http://www.slideshare.net/vodqanite/testing-the-mysterious-sphere
Break
Test Automation - Principles, Practices	Vardhan Bhatt & Vikrant Chauhan	http://www.slideshare.net/vodqanite/lessons-learnt-from-test-automation-principles-practices
Tea + Snacks break
Patterns in Test Automation (Framework + Data)	Anand Bagmar	http://www.slideshare.net/abagmar/patterns-in-test-automation

 

Feedback

• Ur event is successful when attendees r so involved that they forgot to tweet abt it till d lunch brk :) #VodQA #VodQAPune #ThoughtWorks

• Overall workshop was wonderful. Presentation and content was good. Helpful to understand and implement in our current process.

• Agile testing game taught us to focus more on quality than quantity & take feedback as soon as possible from the PO

• Though I am not working in Agile env currently, I understood whole session and got to learn something.

The always rocking vodQA Pune team!!

vodQA Pune team

Enabling CD at Agile Noida

On 29th November 2015, I spoke in Agile Noida on "Enabling Continuous Delivery (CD) in Enterprises with Testing".

Below is the abstract, slides and video from the talk.

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.

Testing (automation) is one of the important practices that needs to be setup correctly for CD to be successful. But, this is tricky and requires a lot of discipline, rigor and hard work by all the team members involved the product delivery.

All the challenges faced in smaller organizations get amplified when it comes to Enterprises. There are various reasons to this - but most common reasons are - scale, complexity of the domain, complexity of the integrations (to internal / external system), involvement of various partners / vendors, long product life-cycles, etc.

In such situations, the Testing complexity and challenges also increase exponentially!

Learn, via a case study of an Enterprise, a large Bank, the Testing approach required to take them on the journey to achieving CD.

Slides

Enabling CD in Enterprises with Testing from Anand Bagmar

Video

 

 

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

 

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

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

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.