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.
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.
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:
I had the opportunity recently to do some testing, though for a very short time, in the Medical domain - something that I have always aspired to. I learnt a lot in this time and have gained a lot of appreciation for people working in such mission-critical domains.
Some of these experiences have been published here as "A Humbling Experience in Oncology Treatment Testing" on ThoughtWorks Insight. Looking forward for your comments and feedback on the same.
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)
Selenium has been around for over a decade now. ThoughtWorks has published an eBook on the occasion - titled - "Perspectives on Agile Software Testing". This eBook is available for free download.
I have written a chapter in the eBook - "Is Selenium Finely Aged Wine?"
An excerpt of this chapter is also published as a blog post on utest.com. You can find that here.
Inspired by Selenium's 10th Birthday Celebration, a bunch of ThoughtWorkers have compiled an anthology of essays on testing approaches, tools and culture by testers for testers.
This anthology of essays is available as an ebook, titled - "Perspectives on Agile Software Testing" which is now available for download from here on ThoughtWorks site. A simple registration, and you will be able to download the ebook.
Here are the contents of the ebook:
Enjoy the read, and looking forward for the feedback.
[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.