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SauceCon 2020 - Automating Tactically and Strategically

4 minute read - Conference

Live Recording with Q&A

SauceCon 2020

SauceCon 2020 was moved online as a free conference.

Title: Automating Tactically and Strategically

One of the biggest concepts that has made a difference to my programming and automating is the concept of “Tactical Vs Strategic”. Tactical being for a specific purpose, possibly a bit rough around the edges, not necessarily completely robust for everyone, etc.. And Strategic being critical to long term aims, maintained and maintainable, etc. In this talk I will provide examples of both strategic and tactical automating for activities as diverse as supporting testing, marketing and general life. We will also consider how and when to move from automating tactically to strategically. And how the concept has helped me change my programming style and how I write code.


Virtuoso Webinar - The Future of Testing

1 minute read - Webinars Conference

Virtuoso Webinar April 2020

On 28th April 2020, I presented in a Webinar with Joe Colantonio.

The webinar was sponsored by Virtuoso.qa

I provided a short presentation on how testing will change in short and long term. And then there was a Q&A session between Adil Mohammed, Joe Colantonio and myself.

You can sign up to watch the live webinar recording with full Q&A using this link.

You can also read a summary of the webinar on the Virtuoso.qa blog


How to assess coverage of automation?

6 minute read - Test Automation

TLDR; Coverage requires some sort of model. We can organise code to support review against a mental model, and some models are executable. Other models we compare against the output of execution.

I was asked a series of questions: How can we document what an automated test does and covers without adding a lot of overhead? How do we know what is not covered by automation?


Observation vs Interrogation

5 minute read - Exploratory Testing

TLDR; Observation in real time. Interrogation after the act. Bringing Interrogation closer to Observation can help detect issues during a process. The depth of Observation and Interrogation changes depending on our knowledge of the system and technology. And we may not be done, if our observation was limited.

When I test I make a distinction between Observation and Interrogation and I’m going to explain what that means, and show you hands on example of how that distinction helps me improve my testing and the scope of of my testing.