Brace yourself from an automation death trap
We all in the voyage to test effectively always think about test automation & let me tell you, its no less crucial & important than production app code. Its a code/framework/architecture built to test your app code and catch some of app defects. This when placed in an eco-system of continuous integration & deployment takes a next level of importance.
I have been fortunate enough to have had my share of failures & eventually learn out of it while automating. In this session, I wish to take my audience through the importance of automation in Agile, the essentials to think of while deciding the tools and also take some tangible take-aways while writing automation code.
The take-aways will be some technical inputs which have immensely helped me to build flexible frameworks for delivery of enterprise products. The aspects this take-aways will touch are on the pressings issues an automation tester face around test data management, code modularization, defining the clarity on responsibilities of different modules/classes written in an automation framework.
This session will be a good dialogue supported with some live demos for better understanding & overall making us think to stay away from the obvious failures.
Outline/Structure of the Case Study
The structure I plan to do is,
- Clear the objective & bring in a crucial perspective of having automation at heart of software delivery. Its as important as app code!
- My experience in travel domain for web & mobile app delivery. This also in context of being Agile Tester!
- The different challenges and the propose solution for it, (I will take this as a case-study mostly in travel domain)
- Test Data Management
- Emphasis for inclusivity of testers. Make Automation as your live documentation so even manual testers OR business feels the connect & value addition.
- Emphasis on Code Modularization for different components of automation.
- Driver & its responsibilities.
- Utilities & Support tasks/patches
- Try moving towards Page Objects with clearly defined services.
- Open mind to refactoring.
- Try to write tests for your core framework utilities! This is an important aspect.
- Also, seed in some thoughts of how to pitch in for the criticality of automation & getting approved capacity in some rigid organization. This is the most important struggle of a tester.
Learning Outcome
Any one attending the session will surely take below mentioned points & should be able to apply in their corresponding project contexts,
- Everyone should feel convinced of automation is not a by product & should be treated well.
- A manual tester, project manager would be able to understand the importance of automation in software delivery & how crucial when done in Agile.
- An automation coder(Dev or QA), should be able to related some of the challenges they definitely face & apply the learnings suggested in the session.
- Anyone doing client consulting should be able to explain the criticality of having a well written, maintainable automation framework & how it eventually helps in delivery.
- Continuous Integration demands automation safety nets & this session just adds the right weightage to inculcate good practices!
Target Audience
Manual testers; Automation coders; PMs; Tech leads
Schalk Cronjé
Aditya Garg
Renu Rajani
Brijesh Deb
Anish Cheriyan
