SPEAKERS – USA Season 5

LORI AZERRAD - Mobile Lead, CuriosityStream

FULL CI/CD FOR RN APPS USING APPCENTER AND XAMIRIN UI TEST

Appcenter is a great tool for mobile app CI/CD but within it's realm is the testing section , when used correctly Appcenter can become and efficient full CI/CD deployment tool using it's free tier Launch Tests that and more so the option

PARAG GULWANI - Staff QA Engineer, Vonage

TEST AUTOMATION FRAMEWORK - AUTOMATION EAZY

Situation: We need to build an Automation test setup whose test results can be viewed, analyzed, and re-executed by any team member other than the QA Automation team ( BA, Project Manager, NOC technician ). When there is an Automation test failure a non-automation test developer should be able to debug the test results and re-run the tests.

Approach to solve the situation: We can develop the Selenium-based test automation framework, which runs the automation tests. And we can have a customized Web Application, which provides user-friendly access to our Automation tests, where any of the user accessing this web application can have to do the following tasks without any knowledge of test automation: View of the latest test run results, Run all the automation tests for a given project or even a single test within a given project Also can have the ability to create basic automation tests.

ARVIND VERMA - Lead SDET, S&P Global

HOW EFFECTIVE IS YOUR TEST AUTOMATION SCRIPTING?

One of the core responsibilities of testing is to provide confidence in the product being built. To do that we should be confident of the automation tools we use, the automation framework we build, and the automation code we write. We should look at them not just as automation scripts, but more holistically like a tool or a framework.

To achieve that let’s look at some of the key objectives to consider ensuring test automation is effective.
1. Build the high-level Automation Architecture: Right when the product architecture is being built.
2. Build the low-level designs: When teams go into feature level design creation, the test automation team should present their automation designs in parallel
3. Consider Nonfunctional Requirements (NFRs) testing: Invest time in analyzing which tool will fit your need for performance, load, stress, or any other NFR testing that the product demands.
4. Plugin the automated code reviews. There are many open-source tools available that can fit directly in your IDE (like SonarLint) and help you to improve your code quality.
5. Test your Test Framework or Tool: This is an incremental exercise and it happens once automation starts running.
6. Build reusability and scalability: Reusability like how I can manage all my configurations in a single place, or test data management, etc. Scalability how can I run the same test across browsers, or across different API endpoints, etc.
7. Consider Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery pipeline executions: Build the automation in a way that it will run in a pipeline and easy to switch environments. With Agile and DevOps this is a must.

SUKESH RADHAKRISHNA - SDN/NFV Architect, Verizon

ZERO TOUCH AUTOMATION (ZETA) IN A FAST PACED ENVIRONMENT (Co-Presenting with Sudeep Choudhury)

This article demonstrates a methodology to conduct extreme automation (Zero Touch or No Touch) with an embedded QA team, wearing multiple hats, to speed up the entire software development life-cycle. This model has been successfully proven in a POD and can be easily replicated across teams. We first introduce the concept of PODs, which is a distributed and diverse team, working for common goals and each member in the POD plays multiple roles – ex: develop & deploy; SME, QA & triage etc.

Extreme automation can be achieved by bringing together modern tools, technologies, advanced software development and testing practices, robust processes and skilled human resources. This concept starts with transforming the mindset of POD members by thinking about automation of entire SDLC and programatically automating any repetitive manual effort right from the requirement phase through development, QA, deployment and post production maintenance. The POD requires a team of highly skilled and motivated human resources, who are hungry to learn, experiment, improvise and innovate. Since modern engineering principles involve multiple and evolving technologies, automating the Wycliffe is tool agnostic. Rather, it involves multiple tools and technologies, preferably open source, which are skillfully engineered and integrated to test complex code and functionality, without human touch or intervention.

SUDEEP CHOUDHURY - Director, Cognizant

ZERO TOUCH AUTOMATION (ZETA) IN A FAST PACED ENVIRONMENT (Co-Presenting with Sukesh Radhakrishna)

This article demonstrates a methodology to conduct extreme automation (Zero Touch or No Touch) with an embedded QA team, wearing multiple hats, to speed up the entire software development life-cycle. This model has been successfully proven in a POD and can be easily replicated across teams. We first introduce the concept of PODs, which is a distributed and diverse team, working for common goals and each member in the POD plays multiple roles – ex: develop & deploy; SME, QA & triage etc.

Extreme automation can be achieved by bringing together modern tools, technologies, advanced software development and testing practices, robust processes and skilled human resources. This concept starts with transforming the mindset of POD members by thinking about automation of entire SDLC and programatically automating any repetitive manual effort right from the requirement phase through development, QA, deployment and post production maintenance. The POD requires a team of highly skilled and motivated human resources, who are hungry to learn, experiment, improvise and innovate. Since modern engineering principles involve multiple and evolving technologies, automating the Wycliffe is tool agnostic. Rather, it involves multiple tools and technologies, preferably open source, which are skillfully engineered and integrated to test complex code and functionality, without human touch or intervention.

NUPUR RAWAT - Senior Consultant, Thoughtworks

TESTING TODAY’S APPLICATION – TEST AUTOMATION TOOLS YOU CAN USE

UI Automation has always been a painful and slow process. But with introduction new tools it has been really awesome.Web Driver io and Cypress is continuously coming out as a popular choice for UI framework.

MADHOO BANDI - QA Specialist, Booxi, a SaaS solution provider

SETTING UP EFFECTIVE AND SCALABLE TEST AUTOMATION ENVIRONMENTS

Startups to Enterprise companies, most of them are following SaaS model.

Keeping SaaS in mind, as a QA Automation Analyst, how can you come up with an effective and scalable test automation framework as SaaS businesses are expected to have exponential growth in not only number of customers but also into different countries, languages, and different functional configurations.

KOREN TOWNSEND - Sr. Project Manager, Red Hat

QA TO PM...BRING MY SKILLS TO THE TABLE

In my experience as a Quality Assurance Engineer and Developer on multiple software development projects, I’ve learned how to adapt and use a QA/Dev mindset to any project team. Now that I'm in a new role, my talk will focus on how I use my QA/Dev skills to be a more effective project manager.

ANNIE BHAUMIK - Senior Test Engineer, OCLC

NEED FOR SPEED- HOW TO PERFORMANCE TEST THE RIGHT WAY

Nobody likes a slow application. In today’s world most users abandon a website if it does not load within 3s(based on Google’s research). Performance failures can cost millions of dollars to businesses. There is a tremendous need to performance test the right way. In this talk we will focus on how performance testing is beyond only load testing and how to design realistic performance tests. We will also talk about different types of performance tests and how they can identify specific weaknesses in the system and can prevent performance failures in production.

SUNITA MCCOY - IT Director

ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE CHAMPIONSHIP DURING IT TRANSFORMATION

While people, process, and tools are all core to IT transformation, change champions are critical to enabling the desired success.

Focus on introspectively championing the change by embracing diversity, inclusion, and empowering associates.

Given the pandemic and remote circumstances, championing change virtually can seem challenging. I like to pursue it with a cup of “TEA” - Talent, Empathy, and Accountability. With great power comes great responsibility. Take nothing for granted, leadership is a privilege. Empower, motivate and enable success.

DR.JOHN CRUNK - Lead Software Automation Engineer, Mobile Health Consumers

TEST AUTOMATION FRAMEWORK

Test automation frameworks have evolved over the past recent years to a level introducing new and innovative programming within test automation. The introduction of new frameworks let QA engineers become better aligned with developers and even be classified as developers in most organizations. A test automation framework can be defined as a set of best practices or rules that define how people go about doing functional and non-functional testing. Often, the software is written to help enforce these best practices in the implementation of test automation. There are cases where this software is written specifically for a single application. This singularity in software is a mistake made in the development of software used as a framework for test automation. In an evaluation of writing software for test automation, the best structure is to first write a generic framework to enforce the best practices of test automation. Next, a generic set of methods and classes should be written for an additional layer of abstraction in the model. Finally, the specifics of test cases and scenarios are written in the implementation of the framework and shared methods. Omission of any of these levels leaves disparities in the test automation causing extra work and possible increases in risk of test cases that are forgotten. The evolution of test automation frameworks requires that a new approach be taken with the development of the test automation of applications.

RALUCA VARTIC - Senior Test Automation Engineer, Macadamian

TEST AUTOMATION AS A TEAM RESPONSIBILITY

When the responsibility of automating tests is passed over a wall on to a separate team, we lose accountability, become less efficient, duplicate efforts, delay and complicate maintenance and sadly, often get discouraged.

In this talk, I will be walking through some narratives that are common on projects and that have a negative impact on test automation. Each scenario will be presented like a myth to be busted, along with specific recommendations for addressing it. In the end, I will give some recommendations, a mix of:
- tips for getting the team involved and engaged in quality efforts (with a focus on automation),
- general automation guidelines.

Myths to be busted:
- Our schedule is aggressive, we don’t have time for automation (or the core team doesn’t have time for automation)
- I am a developer, it is not my responsibility to write tests
- I am a test automation engineer. Everyone stay away from my code!
- Regression testing is the responsibility of another team (the regression team)
- Tests are flaky. There is too much overhead in writing and maintaining automated tests.
- I am going to lose my job to robots

IAN RENAULD - QA Manager, Scientific Games Digital

USE API FUNCTIONAL TESTS TO PERFORM LOAD TESTING WITH KARATE & GATLING

There has always as been a clear separation between API functional test tools and load/performance test tools. Most API functional test tools do not concern themselves with load testing and most performance/load testing tools are somewhat complex and aren't the first tools that would come to mind when implementing a functional test framework.

But what if I told you it is possible to basically re-use your API testing framework almost as-is to run your load/performance tests?

SANJAY POLKAM - Sr QA Automation lead, ERPA group inc.,

INTEGRATING AUTOMATION TESTING TO DEVOPS AND AGILE

How to convert any Automation project to CI CD pipeline using Devops Github and Jenkins.

Successful implementation of CI CD pipleline for end to end automation using Devops and Agile

MAROS KUTSCHY - Senior QA Automation Engineer, Ness

VISUAL UI TESTING WITH PERCY

Main Message: Along with Functional testing of the UI with Selenium and Layout testing of the UI with the Galen framework, it is essential to perform also Visual UI testing. Among the tools on the market, I chose Percy https://percy.io/. Even with the free plan, you have 5000 screenshots per month. These days full of challenges related to the Covid crisis when companies try to automate everything that is possible, I think performing automated visual checks instead of the time-consuming manual check is a very good strategy for companies to be more effective and productive.

A brief introduction about the topic: On our project we had to decide how to automate the specific applications, which have many visual elements. We are using the Java Cucumber automation framework for UI and API testing. For UI testing we are using Selenium, but this tool is not very suitable for Visual testing. Therefore, we decided to do POC for Visual testing of this specific application with Percy https://percy.io/

What problems we were facing: We didn’t have many experiences with visual testing, we played in the past with Percy’s main competitor – Applitools Eyes, but we didn’t invest much time into this. The biggest challenge was to find out how to integrate running Percy tests into CI Jenkins build, how to get Slack notifications to be notified about Percy validations results, and how to stabilize the tests. Another problem was related to a big refactor of the framework, after which Percy integration stopped working.

How we solved the problems: The problem with CI Jenkins integration: we are using the Java Cucumber framework, but Percy requires Node Js installed. We solved the problem with communication between Jenkins slave and Jenkins master by the special setup of Jenkins job and also one-time setup on Jenkins slave.

As you do not see results of Percy validations in the framework reports, we integrated Slack notification after each Percy job build.

We regularly improve tests to be more stable Problems after the big refactor of the framework: we created a temporary git branch without refactoring from which we run the tests

Lessons learned from this experience: Integration of Percy into our automation framework was a good decision. POC was successful and we have now already around 180 scenarios testing this specific application. We learned that this tool serves good to our needs but it is necessary to invest time to properly understand how it works and to integrate it into the framework. This time investment paid off.

What will I share with the attendees: I will share my experience with Percy including a live demo about how to integrate it in any framework, how to run the tests, how to check the results, and how to integrate it in the CI process.

SUSAN BOLDUC - Sr Test Automation Developer, Talent Accelerator

AUTOMATING YOUR GEB/SPOCK/GROOVY AUTOMATION

2 parts:
Part 1: Introduction to using Geb/Spock/Groovy for Test Automation
Part 2: Introduction to a Page and Test Object Generation tool I wrote

Geb/Spock/Groovy is a great way to automated your testing especially with a starter tool to get your project running fast!

BEDFORD WEST - Head of Test Engineering, M1 Finance

CONSUMER-DRIVEN CONTRACT TESTS FOR SAFE SERVICES

Microservices are ubiquitous in technology these days and it's important to expand our testing toolbox to effectively achieve a safe level of test coverage for a service-oriented architecture. Consumer-driven contract testing is a popular technique whereby we can verify the contractual interactions between clients and services as specified and expected from the consumer of a given service. In this talk, I will demonstrate how we've used Pact (https://docs.pact.io/) to implement consumer-driven tests between our GraphQL API gateway and our back-end services.

PAUL LYLES - Software Quality Analyst II, Quorum Software

EXPLORING FOR RISKS IN TEST SESSIONS USING HEURISTICS

If quality is value to someone who matters and if stakeholders need to know what threatens the quality and on-time delivery of their products and services, then session based testing in an exploratory way is a powerful, effective and timely approach to expose the risks that can diminish value.

In this speaking session, Paul will draw insight from founders of the context-driven school of testing to reveal the origin and history of exploratory testing as well as common misconceptions and benefits of testing in an exploratory way. He will introduce a session-based testing approach that leverages heuristics, oracles and a wide variety tools to quickly expose product risks in real-time enabling stakeholders to make informed timely strategic decisions.

JEFF HINZ - Sr. Test Consultant, SQA at Critical Logic

MODEL-BASED TESTING UTILIZING CODELESS AUTOMATION AND CONTINUOUS TESTING

Model Based Testing has gained popularity in recent years. The concept of model based testing is essentially a test design technique within the test strategy. This presentation gives a general overview of cause and effect MBT, and the application of IQM Studio utilizing a code-less test automation framework and continuous testing We hope this makes the concept of cause and effect MBT, code-less test automation and continuous testing (DevOps) clearer and easier too implement.

ADAM SANDMAN - CEO, Inflectra Corporation

DEVOPS DANCE - SHIFT LEFT, SHIFT RIGHT - GET IT RIGHT

As more organizations move towards continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) with DevOps pipelines becoming the norm, where is the right place to do different kinds and levels of testing? In this presentation, I will provide a blueprint for test managers in how to think about shifting left and shifting right while keeping the overall QA picture and goals in mind.

NATE CUSTER - Senior Manager, TTC Global

IMAGES OF THE ROLE OF QA

We all have preconceived notions of what Quality Assurance should look like. In this session, I will present 4 common misconceptions that people have for the role of QA or testing within an organization. The presentation will discuss about how each of these misconceptions can corrupt a person’s work and experience in these roles. Afterwards, I will provide an alternative way to think about QA and how we can measure these expectations against certain metrics and KPIs.

DARSHAN DAVE - Founder and Principal, Reify Strategies

ASSURING CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

Technology prowess is rapidly levelling off and organizations will compete in the next economy based on the experience they provide their customers. Beyond traditional digital transformation we saw from the pre-covid era, the next wave of transformation is centered on the Customer experience. For the quality assurance and testing community that was purely focused on the digital and traditional testing, this poses new challenges. Organizations that had developed specialized testing, automation, methodologies, processes and tools will now need to reinvent all of this to assure sentiments, empathy, experience and trust. This will need a radically different and innovative thinking, processes and methodologies.

BRIAN LE SUER - Chief Executive Officer, Zeenyx Software, Inc.

BUILDING A STARTUP AND RECOVERY SYSTEM FOR TEST AUTOMATION

This presentation will teach the principles of designing a robust test automation architecture that ensures that test failures will not impact the execution of subsequent tests. The presenter will explain how to create a test class that includes startup and recovery mechanisms to make sure that each test in a suite of tests can be run independently.

THOMAS HAVER - Test Automation Architect, Red Green Refactor

THE RISE AND BENEFITS OF ROBOTIC PROCESS AUTOMATION

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a term given to technology that allows developers to programmatically emulate the actions of a human to execute a business process. RPA often operates on the user interface (UI) layer to capture data or interact with an application or across multiple applications to perform tasks that are considered repetitive or time-consuming. Originally focused on business processes, many RPA solutions now integrate with SDLC tools. While the promises of easy adoption and scaling are made by almost every vendor, the reality is a long-term commitment to an RPA program is the same as any new application. In this presentation, the audience will learn about the benefits of RPA, multiple RPA use cases, and how RPA can be assimilated into an enterprise.

VINAYAK SEN - Delivery Lead, Tata Consultancy Services Limited

TEST DATA MANAGEMENT - TOOLS & TECHNIQUES

In many organizations, testing often becomes inefficient due to manual data seeding and lack of proper test data provisioning processes, and eventually, defect leakages occur due to the absence of “Production like” data scenarios.

By adopting to right Test Data Management tools and techniques, it is possible to make Test Data Availability, not a limitation, rather the biggest strength of QA.