How to enable seamless running of appium tests on developer machines?

I am implementing cucumber-jvm based framework to drive mobile apps (using Appium).

Here is what I need to be able to do -

1. Run tests on local machine for quick validation. This is mainly for developers to be able to run the tests before pushing code changes in git.
2. Trigger and Run the tests in the cloud to run against emulators / real devices. 

To achieve point #1, I need the setup to be simple. I do not want the team to go through massive steps to get the environment (Appium, emulators, etc.) setup.

Can / should the whole setup be put inside a docker container - and provide single command to setup and run the tests?

Any other approach you recommend?

Of course - whatever approach is taken, should potentially extend seamlessly to address point #2.

Does a Tester need a Career Path?

On Nov 22nd, 2016, I asked a question via Twitter and Facebook - 

Does a Tester need a career path? 

• If yes, what would the options be?
• If no, why not? 

Below are the comments I received. Do you have any more thoughts on this?

Agile Testing & Patterns in Test Automation Framework coming to Singapore

I will be doing a 1-day workshop on Agile Testing and also a talk on "Patterns of a Good Test Automation Framework" as part of Unicom's World Conference Next Gen Testing Summit on Oct 13-14 2016 in Singapore.

See the site for more details, or contact me for more information on the same.

Sharing the pain in Automating with Protractor & WebDriver

As mentioned in my earlier post titled "Taking Protractor to the next level", on 25th June 2016, Nikitha Iyer and I spoke in Selenium Conference 2016, Bangalore, India on "Sharing the pain in Automating with Protractor & WebDriver".

The video is finally available and I am now able to share (see below) all the details of the talk from one post.

Abstract

There is a saying ..."Sukh baatne se badhta hai, dukh baatne se kam hota hai", translated as - "happiness increases & sadness reduces on sharing with others".

We want to take this opportunity to share with our experiences - the good and the bad, in the journey of building a Test Automation framework for an AngularJS based application. 

We will learn, by a case study, what thought process we applied on the given context (product, team, skills, capabilities, long term vision) to come up with an appropriate Test Automation Strategy. This Test Automation strategy covered all aspects of Test Automation - Unit, Integration, UI - i.e. End-2-End tests (E2E).

Next, we will share how we went about narrowing-down, and eventually selecting a specific Tech Stack + Tools (Javascript / Jasmine / Protractor / Selenium-WebDriver) to accomplish the Test Automation for the product.

Lastly, we will share the challenges that came up in the implementation of the Test Automation, and how we overcame them. This will also include how we managed to get the tests running in Jenkins - a Continuous Integration tool. 

This discussion is applicable to all team members who are working on Test Automation!

P.S. We will be attempting to make a sample protractor-based automation framework available on github for anyone to use as a starting point for setting up protractor-based Test Automation framework.

Slides

Sharing the pain using Protractor from Anand Bagmar

Video

Slides & Video from Test Data - Food for Test Automation Framework

As posted earlier, I spoke about "Test Data - Food for your Test Automation Framework!" at Selenium Conference 2016 in Bangalore on 24th June 2016 in front of a packed and a very interactive audience. What a great time it was!

The video for that session is finally available! I have updated the original post as well as linked the slides & video with this post as well.

Video

Slides

Test Data - Food for your Test Automation Framework from Anand Bagmar

Taking Protractor to the next level

As I got onto a project early this year - my paths crossed again with Protractor / Angular / JavaScript. Despite my past experiences with this tech stack, I needed to remain positive when approaching this challenge.

In this case, the context was quite different. That said, the challenges, though reduced compared to my first attempt at using Protractor effectively, were still around. 

I had posted a set of questions on my blog, various LinkedIn and facebook groups - and got a lot of suggestions and advice how to proceed. Thanks to all of them, it did make my life easier.

Then, as part of Selenium Conference 2016 held in Bangalore on 24-25th June 2016, my friend and colleague - +Nikita Iyer and I spoke about "Sharing the Pain of Automating with Protractor & WebDriver". The intention was multi-fold:

• We wanted to share what challenges we had faced on the team when using Protractor, and also how we overcame certain challenges. This was to help others in similar situations to learn from our mistakes & solutions.
• We also wanted to learn from the attendees what other challenges & solutions they had come up with in their experiences with this Protractor tool-stack.

I am very happy to say that we were successful in achieving both these objectives quite successfully.

Below is the details from the talk.

Abstract

There is a saying ..."Sukh baatne se badhta hai, dukh baatne se kam hota hai", translated as - "happiness increases & sadness reduces on sharing with others".

We want to take this opportunity to share with our experiences - the good and the bad, in the journey of building a Test Automation framework for an AngularJS based application. 

We will learn, by a case study, what thought process we applied on the given context (product, team, skills, capabilities, long term vision) to come up with an appropriate Test Automation Strategy. This Test Automation strategy covered all aspects of Test Automation - Unit, Integration, UI - i.e. End-2-End tests (E2E).

Next, we will share how we went about narrowing-down, and eventually selecting a specific Tech Stack + Tools (Javascript / Jasmine / Protractor / Selenium-WebDriver) to accomplish the Test Automation for the product.

Lastly, we will share the challenges that came up in the implementation of the Test Automation, and how we overcame them. This will also include how we managed to get the tests running in Jenkins - a Continuous Integration tool. 

This discussion is applicable to all team members who are working on Test Automation!

P.S. We will be attempting to make a sample protractor-based automation framework available on github for anyone to use as a starting point for setting up protractor-based Test Automation framework.

Slides

Sharing the pain using Protractor from Anand Bagmar

Video

- will be updated once available

Pictures

Test Data - Food for Test Automation Framework at Selenium Conference 2016

[Updated - Pictures added, Video added]

I spoke about "Test Data - Food for your Test Automation Framework!" at Selenium Conference 2016 in Bangalore on 24th July 2016 in front of a packed and a very interactive audience. What a great time it was!

Here is some information about the session - 

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.

Teams already building 1000s of tests of various types - UI, web service-based, integration, unit, etc. is a proof of that.

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.

In this talk, we will focus on one of the critical aspects and patterns in building the Test Automation framework - Test Data!

We will look at different data patterns as options and techniques how to create, manage, use, reuse Test Data in a way to keep the tests running in an reliable and deterministic way. We will also discuss what questions to ask, what things to think about in selecting your approach for Test Data!

This discussion will be applicable for any type of Test Automation (web / mobile / desktop), but, we will focus primarily on UI automation frameworks, ex. using Selenium.

Slides

Test Data - Food for your Test Automation Framework from Anand Bagmar

Video

Pictures

Patterns in Test Automation & Enabling CD at ThinkTest 2015

Thanks to Smita Mishra for organizing ThinkTest 2015 and more so, for giving me the opportunity to speak on a couple of topics.

Here is some brief information from my talks. Links to videos will be posted soon.

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

Based on past experiences, I changed this talk to focus only on the Patterns for Test Automation Framework. I have now prepared a separate talk for Test-Data Patterns in Test Automation. Hopefully will get a chance to share my thoughts on that in the near future.

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:

1. Build your Test Automation Framework
2. Test Data Management
3. 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!

Slides:

Patterns in Test Automation from Anand Bagmar

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.

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

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