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.

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:

Disruptive Testing with Julian Harty

As part of the Disruptive Testing series, the last interview of 2014, with Julian Harty is now available here (http://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/disruptive-testing-part-8-julian-harty) as a video interview. The transcript of the same is also published.

Also look at ThoughtWorks Insights for other great articles on a variety of topics and themes.

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)

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.

Perils of Page-Object Pattern

I spoke at Selenium Conference (SeConf 2014) in Bangalore on 5th September, 2014 on "The Perils of Page-Object Pattern".

Page-Object pattern is very commonly used when implementing Automation frameworks. However, as the scale of the framework grows, there is a limitation on how much re-usability really happens. It inherently becomes very difficult to separate the test intent from the business domain.
 
I want to talk about this problem, and the solution I have been using - Business Layer - Page-Object pattern, which has helped me keep my code DRY.

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

Video taken by professional:


Video taken from my laptop:


Slides:

Perils of Page-Object Pattern from Anand Bagmar

If you want to see other slides and videos from SeConf, see the SeConf schedule page.

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.

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!

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.

Oraganising vodQA

My blog on "Organizing a successful meetup - Tips from vodQA" is now available from ThoughtWorks Insights page.

BDT in Colombo Selenium Meetup

[UPDATED again] Feedback and pictures from the virtual session on BDT

 









[UPDATED]
The slides and audio + slide recording have now been uploaded.


I will be talking virtually and remotely about "Building the 'right' regression suite using Behavior Driven Testing (BDT)" in Colombo's Selenium Meetup on Wednesday, 23rd October 2013 at 6pm IST.

If you are interested in joining virtually, let me know, and if possible, I will get you a virtual seat in the meetup.

vodQA Pune - Faster | Smarter | Reliable schedule announced

A very impressive and engrossing schedule for vodQA Pune scheduled for Saturday, 19th October 2013 at ThoughtWorks, Pune has now been announced. See the event page for more details.

I am going to be talking about "Real-time Trend and Failure Analysis using Test Trend Analyzer (TTA)"

Real-time Trend and Failure Analysis using Test Trend Analyzer (TTA)

Real-time Trend and Failure Analysis using Test Trend Analyzer (TTA)

Anand Bagmar

Summary

Organizations have long running products / programs. They need to understand the health of their products / projects at a quick glance, instead of having a team of people manually scrambling frantically to collate and collect the information needed to get a sense of quality
about the products they support. 

TTA is an open source product that becomes the source of information to give you real-time 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.

The Dream

The statement "I have a dream" is a very famous quote by American activist Martin Luther King Jr.

I resonate very closely with that. Here is why and how ...

Sometime in 2011, I had a dream ... a vision about a product that can help those working in large organizations understand the health of their products / projects at a quick glance, instead of having a team of people manually scrambling frantically to collate and collect the information needed to get a sense of quality about the products they support….

I called this dream - Test Trend Analyzer - TTA

What is TTA?

In a nutshell, given all various types of Test Automation is done in your organization, TTA is a product that stores and parses the test run results, and then displays various Trend Analysis charts and also does Test Failure analysis for you. Based on the context of the product under test, the viewer can then make more meaning of the data presented, and more importantly, take meaningful actions / next steps.

Why do I need to Trend Analysis of the test results?

Automation (Unit / Integration / Functional / etc.) is a key factor in ensuring the success, quality and time-to-market for products.

Since Automated tests are executed via CI (Continuous Integration), a lot of trend analysis and test failure analysis is already be done by the CI tool itself.

However, the ability of CI doing this is limited for the following reasons:

• The typical archival duration in CI is in the range from 15-45 days.
• Only trends can be seen after grouping relevant jobs in the CI tool.
• It is difficult to group all related product jobs in CI – because of the sheer volume of tests.
• The grouping of jobs becomes more challenging if the number of products / projects / vendors or partners / environments / etc. are more in number.
• The projects / products are long running (many months to years). It is not practical to archive the results for such duration in CI.

I have seen first-hand many of the use cases listed below from real scenarios, where we need a unique and different product to solve some Testing Specific problems:

• A Business Manager / Test Director overseeing multiple products development in the organization may want to see the overall health of all the products in his / her portfolio, in real time.
• A Product Owner / PM / Test Manager overseeing the product development / testing of a specific product in the organization may want to see the overall health of the product, in real time.
• Individual team members (Tech Leads / QAs / Developers / etc.) want to do quick test failure analysis in order to decide the correct priority of next set of tasks.

Vision for TTA

With the above considerations in mind, I came up with the following vision statement for TTA:

•       A single point, visual solution to gauge the health of your product portfolio using Test Automation results by means of –

–      Trends

–      Failure analysis

•       And providing

–      Drill-down reports

–      Customizable reports

•       So that

–      Different stakeholders can get single click view of the health status and potential issues

–      A project team can decide if automation is useful or not.

–      Automated data collation and trending to avoid manual data aggregation and interpretation

•       With the stakeholders being

–      QA Directors / Managers / Leads / hands-on-tester

–      Developers

–      Tech-Ops

How does TTA work?

TTA is developed as an independent RoR product. It uses MySQL as the database. You will need to install TTA (instructions available on TTA github wiki) on an independent (virtual) machine.

TTA is a decoupled product. It does not depend on any specific CI (Continuous Integration) Tool, programming language, test framework, etc.

CI Jobs typically call some build tool – example ant, maven, gradle, etc. The command called by the CI job does the test setup, and then executes the tests. After execution, the results are sent back to CI, and the test run completed.

After the test execution is completed, to integrate automatic reporting of results to TTA, we need to:

• Zip the log folder, and,
• Send the results with test meta-data information

Current set of Features for TTA

·       Test Pyramid view (/pyramid) - to see how your project's automation effort aligns with the Test Automation philosophy

·       Comparative Analysis view (/comparative_analysis) - to see the trend of your test automation results over a period of time, and if any patterns emerge

·       Failure Analysis view (/defect_analysis) - to make better meaning of the test failures, and help you prioritize which failures should be fixed first.

·       Integration of external dashboards (add from /admin page, see integration on /home page) - this allows one to integrate different existing dashboards into TTA - to make it a one stop place for seeing all Testing related information. Example: You can integrate your defect reports from Mingle / Jira / etc., or, you can also integrate your specific Continuous Integration (CI) dashboard from Go / Jenkins / Hudson / Bamboo / etc.

·       Test Execution Trend - to see the benchmarking of specific test execution over a time period

·       Compare test runs (/compare_runs) - to compare specific test runs

o   what are the common failures, 

o   what are the unique failures, 

o   what failed on date 1, but passed on date 2

o   what failed on date 2, but passed on date 1

·       Upload Test Run Data manually (/upload) - to manually upload test data in case if you have not uploaded test data automatically to TTA, but still want to use TTA

·       TTA Statistics Page (/stats) - to know usage of TTA by different projects / teams in your organization

Refer to my blog or the TTA-github-wiki for other information, including screenshots about TTA.

Current state

TTA is available as an open-source product via github. There are a couple of clients (internal to ThoughtWorks, and external) using TTA in their projects.

How can you contribute?

Given that we have implemented only a few basic features right now, and there are many more in the backlog, here is how you can help:

• Suggest new ideas / features that will help make TTA better
• Use TTA on your project and provide feedback
• More importantly, help in implementing these features

Contact information

Contact Anand Bagmar (anand.bagmar@thoughtworks.com / abagmar@gmail.com) for more information about TTA.