Testtalks | Automation Awesomeness | Helping You Succeed With Test Automation

Tired of getting crushed by bugs? Learn some testing Kung Fu to help you dominate any defect that comes your way. You need to be quick, and you need to recognize when something's not working. You need to be as Bruce Lee said "like water" so you can change your testing approach quickly. In this episode you’ll discover some new testing techniques to improve your testing efforts with David Greenlees, a black belt tester and author of the Software Testing as a Martial Art – There is no One Style.

Hi its Joe just wanted to quickly let you know that there is no TestTalks interview this week. I’m a deacon for a church and we have all our family over for Easter so I’ve been wicked busy preparing for Sunday festivities. But hey, don’t worry we’ll be back next week with an awesome interview with David Greenless about his new book Software Testing as a Martial Art . I also have interviews scheduled with Mark Fink author of the book The Hitchhikers Guide to Test Automation and an interview with HPE’s development team to learn about how they used their own tools for their testing efforts. And If you have an automation success story you’d like to share on an upcoming episode, let’s talk! Send your suggestions to:joe@testtalks.com So stay tuned and as always test everything and keep the good --Peace!  

Managers and engineers can often get lulled into thinking automation is easy. After all, how hard can automation be? You record yourself interacting with the application, then play it back. Done. But how many of us have been burned by that type of thinking? I know I have. It’s up to us as automation engineers to educate the people around us about automation best practices and techniques if we are to have a prayer of surviving in this fast-paced, Agile DevOps world.In this episode Jim Hazen, a veteran of the software testing trenches, shares with us his years of experience in succeeding with test automation. Discover what it takes to implement automation and set realistic expectations for your teams, keeping in mind that it's automation, not automagic!

Have you ever had the feeling that you’re running too many tests? Or redundant tests that are causing you to spend too much time maintaining an ever-growing test suite of what seems like wasted test cases? Does your test suite take a long time to run when all you want to do is make sure a small change you made to a specific area in your application didn’t affect anything else? And did it leave you wondering what combination of test cases would give you the verification coverage you need?These are issues I struggle with, as well – which is why last year at HP Discover in London I was interested to learn about a model-based testing using a tool called Agile Designer. Ever since seeing a demo of the product done by Huw Price, I’ve been hoping to get him to appear on my podcast. I’m happy to announce that today, Huw shares with us his thoughts around model-based testing and test data management.

There have been many changes in the software testing industry in the last several years. Those of us who have been testers for a while know that testing is an actual professional craft; nevertheless, many folks coming out of college – and even some of our own developers – have no idea about testing techniques and tools.If you’re anything like me you’ve probably wished there was a way to keep up with and promote the ever-changing tools and techniques needed to succeed with testing.In this episode, you’ll discover how this is all about to change as we speak with Anna Royzman about her new organization, A Quality Leadership Institute. The mission of A Quality Leadership Institute is to become the world’s leading advocate for quality in technology. Anna has big plans for the organization, which include developing innovative programs on software testing quality and leadership for the tech community, as well as the promotion of software testing as a real discipline in colleges around the world. 

Many test teams have undergone major changes over the past few years. With more and more companies moving towards Agile and DevOps best practices, companies are scrambling to understand how the role of testers fits into this new way of developing software. In this episode, Perze Ababa shares with us his experience in running a testing organization in the 21st century, and discusses the tools and techniques that can help anyone improve their testing efforts.

Are you sick of having to build yet another test automation framework from scratch? I think too many test engineers resort to building automation solutions from scratch without first investigating what other solution might be out there. Why reinvent the wheel? In this episode Pekka Klärck, the creator of the Robot Framework, talks about how it might be just what you’re looking for in an open source test automation framework.For those of you who don't know, the Robot Framework is a generic test automation framework for acceptance testing and acceptance test-driven development (ATDD). It has easy-to-use tabular test data syntax, and utilizes the keyword-driven testing approach. Its testing capabilities can be extended by test libraries implemented either with Python or Java, and users can create new, higher-level keywords from existing ones using the same syntax that is used for creating test cases.

Paul covers many things in this episode, including hunting down elusive, intermittent issues that can cause your automaton to randomly fail due to actual product defects. You’ll also discover how to socially engineer your test automation efforts with empathy and conversations in order to build relationships that will help your automation thrive. This episode is chock-full of good test automation practices, so listen up!

I feel that test data management is one of the biggest challenges to creating reliable test automation across multiple environments. One solution I’ve been hearing more and more about is virtual data. So this episode is all about test data management using data virtualization.Discover how  virtualization can revolutionize the way you approach all your DevOps and test management efforts with Kyle and Brett from Delphix.

If you're not growing you're dying? My question to you is which one are you? Don't be a factory worker tester. The key to success in any technology career is the love of learning and constantly working on your skills. In this episode Mike shares cores concepts like Visual Validation Testing. Metric and Leadership skill and much, much more to equip you to become the best next generation tester you were meant to be.

Don't let your testing efforts fall behind — its time to get ready for the new year. In this episode, I share my insights about upcoming trends in testing gleaned from my popular TestTalks podcast interviews. Discover the skills, best practices and frameworks you need to know to stay employable in a changing dev/test world.

Appium is a cross-platform, open-source, mobile UI automation framework. It allows you to write UI tests for your mobile apps, Android iOS and some other OSs.In today’s episode we’ll be talking with the creator of Appium, Dan Cuellar. Discover why Dan developed Appium and how it can help you create mobile-based automation awesomeness.

One of the biggest problems with learning Selenium is all the various information you need to piece together in order to get started. It’s easy to get frustrated and filled up information overload and end up not making any progress with learning Selenium. Have you ever wished there was a quick jump-start guide that could get you started with test automation without all the bells in whistles, but a concise good practices approach to learning Selenium? Well this episode is for you as we speak with Dave Heaufffner about his new book The Selenium Guidebook – Java edition.

This being the first episode of 2016, I thought it would be a good idea for us to do a testing tune-up. I love automation and testing tools, but I think we can sometimes be easily distracted by cool automation scripts or a sweet new testing tool we’ve discovered rather than focusing on why we’re doing what we are doing and making sure that it’s actually helping our team to create quality software.In this episode Christin will teach us a simple, four-step framework that will help us focus on the things that matter. She will offer some additional tips to make our 2016 testing efforts awesome.

Happy Holidays! I'm taking the last week of December off, but just wanted to THANK YOU for listening to Test Talks in 2015 and share some quick plans for 2016 to make Test Talks even better.

Today’s episode is going to be a little bit different. Since we’re nearing the end of the year, I thought I’d share with you the Test Automaton Playbook presentation I gave at the Øredev Conference in Sweden this past November.I’ve had the privilege of interviewing some of the biggest names in the testing and automation field in 2015, and I think my presentation summed up all the lessons and good practices I’ve picked during those interviews.

In this episode, we’ll talk with Scott Nimrod about Software Craftsmanship and how to take your development and testing efforts to a new level. Discover some modern testing techniques that can really improve the quality of your unit testing and automation testing efforts.Scott’s enthusiasm and hustle around self improvement and making development efforts awesome really shine through in this can’t-miss episode for folks that are serious about testing and development.

In this episode we’ll talk with Mark Collin, author of Mastering Selenium WebDriver. Mark will share with us how to create an extensible test framework, as well as how to write clear, simple, readable and reliable tests that perform complex test automation tasks. If you’re a Selenium automation engineer and are ready to take your Selenium efforts to the next level, this episode is a must-listen.

Virtualization, Cloud Deployments and Cloud-Based Tools have challenged and changed performance testing practices. Today’s performance tester can summon tens of thousands of virtual users from the Cloud in a few minutes at a cost far lower than the expensive, on-premise installations of yesteryear. These newer environments can also cause us to struggle to understand our performance results and have to puzzle out the essential message in each.In this episode, Eric discusses strategies for engaging with these new contexts, performance testing them effectively. He also explains how to better interpret performance test result and create better reporting.  

Projects can fail for many reasons. Some fail because they test the wrong things. Others fail because they test too much. In this episode Todd H. Gardner, an enterprise consultant and founder of TrackJs, shares his many years of development experience in testing atrocities (AKA terrible testing) and what we can learn from them. You’ll come away questioning your own testing. So let’s forget about our long-held testing dogmas and start doing a better job of testing the right things in our software.