Thursday, June 18, 2015

Enabling CD & TTA in Discuss Agile 2015

I had the opportunity to speak in Discuss Agile Delhi 2015 on 2 topics.

Here are the details on the same:


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.

Video:




Slides:






To Deploy, or Not to Deploy? Decide using Test Trend Analyzer (TTA)

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 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.

Slides:



Thursday, May 28, 2015

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!










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[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!

Wednesday, May 20, 2015

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



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?:



Tuesday, May 19, 2015

Role of Automation in Testing

I am speaking in Discuss Agile 2015 conference on 13-14 June 2015 on the following topics - 

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.