Friday, June 27, 2014

The Feedback Tradeoff

If you are a tester doing or involved with Test Automation, or a developer, I hope you are following the exciting debate about Test Driven Development (TDD) and its impact on software design. If you are not, you should!

My summary and takeaways from Part 3 of the series is now out on ThoughtWorks Insights - "The Feedback Tradeoff". 
 

Monday, June 23, 2014

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:

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.

Saturday, June 21, 2014

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.





 

Wednesday, June 18, 2014

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.

Tuesday, June 3, 2014

Monday, June 2, 2014

Is TDD Dead?

If you are a tester doing or involved with Test Automation, or a developer, I hope you are following the exciting debate about Test Driven Development (TDD) and its impact on software design. If you are not, you should!

Following Part 2 of the series "Test-induced design damage" - I wrote a blog which is published on ThoughtWorks Insights - "Test-Induced Design Damage. Fallacy or Reality?"


[UPDATE]: My summary and takeaways from Part 3 of the series is now out on ThoughtWorks Insights - "The Feedback Tradeoff".

Tuesday, May 20, 2014

Monday, May 19, 2014

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!

Thursday, May 15, 2014

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.

Thursday, May 8, 2014

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!