Conference

I spoke at the Test Automation Guild on January 2017 and present “If you want to automate, you learn to code”.

If you want to automate, you learn to code, and you learn to code well.

“Automate” doesn’t mean “Automate Testing” it means “Automate part of your test process”.

You need to learn to code to do that with the most options open to you.

We’ll look at some ‘we do this alot’ and ‘we want to automate’ activities which we can use tools for. But we’ll also see that we are limited by the tools.

May 2016 in London, at the National Software Testing Conference 2016, I presented a talk entitled “The Art of Questioning to improve Testing, Agile, and Automating”

Slides

Details

With only 25 minutes to present, I had to make very sure I was conscious of the main points I was trying to drive home. This was always going to be a topic overview, but I wanted some very obvious and actionable insights for attendees. And hopefully spur them on to future research.

March 2016 in London, at the SIGIST March 2016 Conference, I performed the closing keynote with a talk entitled"Push your technical testing further - into technology and security"

Slides

The slides have been released to slideshare:

The Blurb

The blurb read:

As testers we learn how to functionally test systems. We learn to analyse requirements and test ‘What’ a system should do. We can take our functional testing further. We can test ‘How’ the system does what it does, by understanding the technology used to build the system. We will find defects and issues that we would otherwise miss. Some of the defects would normally be associated with security testing, but we will find them without learning the techniques used for security testing. This approach to testing is applicable to any Software Development methodology and doable by any tester. Alan will explain the specific steps he used to learn to test web applications and push his functional testing further. He will provide examples of tools he uses, and why he uses those tools.

I attended the Tabara de Testare testing group on 3rd February 2015 to present “Lessons Learned When Automating. A live stream from UK to Romania.

The Content

The talk/webinar was drawn from questions submitted by the participants before hand, and from general experiences with automating.

The slides were designed to support offline study so should give a good feel for the content.

The Blurb

I’ve been asked some very challenging questions about lessons learned, and how decisions are made during the process of automating and performing technical testing. In this webinar I’m going to answer them based on my experience. We’ll discus how we know ‘what to automate’ which means we have to split our analysis into ‘detection’ and ’testing’. We’ll cover lessons learned from solving problems, and making mistakes, and steps we can take during the problem solving process e.g. for intermittent failures, and possible tool bugs. We’ll discuss abstraction levels and the different levels of the technology stack to automate: how to do it, and how we make the decisions. We’ll discuss coding primarily the differences, and the overlap, between the needs for coding for testing and coding for production deployment. We’ll also cover some WebDriver specific answers to some of these questions. I’m also going to describe books and techniques that have helped me over the years when trying to deal with these questions on production projects. Also we’ll take additional and follow up questions.

Agile and Automation Days, Poland, Krakow - November 2015

I attended the Agile and Automation Days Conference in Krakow, Poland on the 16th November 2015 to present a Keynote and a Tutorial on Technical Testing in Agile.

The Keynote title was “How to Improve your Technical Test Ability”. I described approaches, tools and mindsets that I use to improve my ability to test with increasing technical competency.

The tutorial covered “Technical Testing in Agile”, how to use and justify technical testing skills in an Agile context. This hands on tutorial requires much interactive investigation and execution.

I attended the Eurostar Mobile Deep Dive in November 2015 to present a session on Technical Mobile Testing - Risk, Issues and Experiences.

Mobile testing offers numerous challenges and the potential for massive scope creep with so many device combinations and tool choices available. We can’t afford to test everything so we make decisions on scope. We have learn to use risk as part of the the decision making process: business risk, and technical risk. In this talk, Alan will describe his experiences of hands-on testing of mobile native applications and mobile web applications, and the application of technical and risk-based thought processes in deciding what, and how, to test.

I attended the TestWorks Conference in Amsterdam on the 2nd of October 2015 to present a Keynote on “Real World Automation Challenges”. Based on my experience writing code to automate applications, and from working with clients world wide, I described challenges faced and the thinking behind the solutions chosen.

So if you want more options for how you approach automating executing then this might be the talk for you.

Slides

Blurb

The theme of the conference was Hands-on experience with different test automation tools. So I drew from my experience to consider different approaches I’ve adopted when automating, considering them as solutions to challenges.

Let us forget theory for a moment, and concentrate on the practice of automation. Alan will describe lessons learned from both success and failure; as a tester, an automator, and a manager. But more importantly, you will discover how to apply these lessons and improve your automation. Learn how to stay focused, how to experiment and still add value, how to manage even if you cannot code, and more…

Planning

Prior to the event I thought that the audience appeared to be a mix of practitioners and managers which was useful since I planned to talk about my experiences of automation from a perspective of a practitioner, and as a manager.

I attended the Test Management Summit on 29th April 2015 to present a session on Successful Test Automation for Managers.

Illustration by Herb Lebowitz from the cover of “Automation” by Carl Dreher

The focus of this session was a discussion about automation from a management perspective. This would allow me to draw upon the experiences of the managers in the room and create a lively discussion.

Partly of the aim of allowing managers with less technical experience draw upon the experiences of those more technical.

I attended the Tabara de Testare testing group on 1st April 2015 to present an introduction to Technical Testing. A little different from a normal conference talk in that the venue was spread over 4 Romanian cities, and I was in the UK.

“Most inspiring webinar I’ve ever seen! I really enjoyed and highly recommended Alan’s online study material way before this, but the webinar was simply amazing! Thanks a lot for the opportunity!”