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)?

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

Starting 2016 with vodQA in Pune - Agile Testing Workshop

Over the past few years, after having spoken in a lot of individuals & teams in conferences & organizations, I realized the understanding of Agile and what does it mean to do effective Testing on Agile projects / teams is very poor.

So, we at ThoughtWorks, Pune, as part of vodQA Pune - Agile Testing Workshop, start 2016 with the objective of connecting with our peers in the Software industry to discuss and understand - "What is Agile and what does it mean to Test on Agile projects / teams?"

We have planned and organized this vodQA conference in a very Lean and simple way - announcement, registrations, agenda and updates - all directly from our vodQA group in facebook.

This edition of vodQA will be held on Saturday, 9th January, 2016 at the ThoughtWorks, Pune office on the 4th floor. For more details, see the vodQA event page in facebook.

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

 

 

Patterns in Test Automation - Framework, Data, Locators at Agile Noida

On 28th November 2015, I spoke in Agile Noida on "Patterns in Test Automation - Framework, Data, Locators".

I had spoken on the same topic (Patterns in Test Automation) in vodQA Hyderabad - but that was a Testing conference and I knew the attendees were Testing and Test Automation focused. Here, I was skeptic about how this topic would be received by the attendees - given that the conference was focused on Agile, and this topic was core Testing related, and to add to the fact - very technical where I was showing various Java / Ruby code samples.

My skepticism was, thankfully, unfounded. There was a good number of attendees that came to the talk and based on conversations after the talk, I realized that I was able to get the message across to the attendees.

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

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

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

 

Good Trends for TTA in DevOps Summit

I spoke in DevOps Summit on 8th Oct in Bangalore on "To Deploy, or Not To Deploy - Decide using TTA's Trend & Failure Analysis".

The conversations during and after this talk with various veterans in the Software Industry, across various different domains; reiterated my belief in the need for me to spend more time in taking TTA to the next level and make it a more robust and feature-rich product.

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

Video from the talk

 

 

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

Web Analytics and the new kids in town!

I spoke in Agile Testing Alliance Global Gathering on 8th Oct in Bangalore on "The What, Why and How of Web Analytics Testing".

This talk was my take on explaining a very important, yet quite ignored, aspect of Product / Application Development - Web Analytics. Below is the abstract of the talk, followed by slides and video from the talk.

Topic: The What, Why & How of Web Analytics Testing

Learning Objectives:

The most used and heard about buzz words in the Software Industry today are … IoT and Big Data!

With IoT, with a creative mindset looking for opportunities and ways to add value, the possibilities are infinite. With each such opportunity, there is a huge volume of data being generated - which if analyzed and used correctly, can feed into creating more opportunities and increased value propositions.

There are 2 types of analysis that one needs to think about.
1. How is the end-user interacting with the product? This will give some level of understanding into how to re-position and focus on the true value add features for the product.
2. With the huge volume of data being generated by the end-user interactions, and the data being captured by all devices in the food-chain of the offering, it is important to identify patterns from what has happened, and find out new product / value opportunities based on usage patterns.

Learn what is Web Analytics, why is it important, and see some techniques how you can test it manually and and also automate that validation.

Slides from the talk

The What, Why and How of Web Analytics Testing (Web, IoT, Big Data) from Anand Bagmar

Video from the talk: