Zach Attas
Lead SDET
ReviewTrackers
location_on United States
Member since 5 years
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Zach Attas
Specialises In (based on submitted proposals)
In college I majored in Philosophy, and had not taken a single computer science course, or written a single line of code. At my first job post college, as a Quality Assurance Analyst, I decided to 'dig under the hood' and learn programming through Udacity -- and I soon became hooked. 2 Nanodegrees later, I got my first job as a Test Engineer, and I haven't looked back since. Now I work at ReviewTrackers in Chicago as their Sr. Test Engineer.
I love digging into problems and root cause analysis -- no doubt this is related to my Philosophy degree. I'd say that only 30% percent of my programming skills came from Udacity. The rest are from a random assortment of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), textbooks, podcasts, blogposts, stack overflow articles, meetup.com events, code documentation, and small projects. Self-directed learning is my thing. When I'm not learning, I'm taking photography classes, improv classes, or cooking something yummy.
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What else can we automate? How to extend your skills and constantly be learning
20 Mins
Talk
Beginner
As a quality engineer, you have to constantly be learning. Not only do you test constantly changing software, the list of tools and frameworks out in the world is ever-growing. How do you stay on top of all that, and continue to grow as a quality engineer for your organization and your own development? Here’s the trick -- you need to convince your organization to give you the freedom to implement new tools and techniques, which allows you to grow as an engineer, and benefits the organization, if the new technology pans out. It’s always a risk/reward calculation. In this talk you will learn how to identify business problems, and convince stakeholders in your company that it’s worth taking the risk implementing new testing technologies to solve them. Together we will identify 4 problems, and how load testing, visual regression testing, security testing, and accessibility testing were able to be implemented in hopes of solving them. These new technologies didn’t always pan out, but the experience of implementing them always revealed something interesting about how we think about software and quality. -
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How to Test When You Have The Keys to The Castle
45 Mins
Case Study
Intermediate
Reliable testing of third party services and micro-services can be tricky. You can always write integration tests, but those are only as good as they are maintained, and as good as the mocks that define them.
This talk describes how to evaluate the best testing strategy for a handful of third party services and micro-services, when you have the ability to change how they are implemented to allow for better test coverage. We’ll cover third party services that handle billing, google metadata, and sending text messages as well as micro-services that do AI text analysis, data scraping, widget and pdf creation.
By the end of this talk, you will be able to create your own testing strategy for these kinds of services, and have confidence in your tests when the code for the services is changed.
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Selenium For All - Setting Your Team Up For Success So Anyone Can Understand and Write Tests
45 Mins
Talk
Intermediate
Are you the only one contributing to your test suite, because others feel too intimidated to contribute to it?
Have you ever looked at a test fail and not known where to investigate first?
This talk will cover techniques for uncomplicating your test suites, so they can clearly test exactly what's needed to be tested, allowing others to contribute tests. When the process of writing tests is shared, everyone has an impact on quality, and that can be quite contagious for a company's culture.
In addition, this talk will cover techniques for failing transparently, so you will no longer feel stressed triaging test fails. Quality is something shared by the entire team, so anyone should be able to triage test fails. When tests fail for a specific, clear reason, you'll be thanking your past self for writing logic to fail transparently, saving you half a day going down a rabbit hole.
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How to Un-Flake Flaky Tests- a New Hire's Toolkit
45 Mins
Talk
Beginner
It's a common scenario - you are starting a new job as a test engineer, excited to improve your new organization's testing culture, eager to instill confidence in the software, and BAM! instead of writing new tests, you are tasked with fixing legacy ones! If this sounds familiar, this talk is for you. I'll cover strategies for taking inventory of flaky tests and setting goals to address flakiness across a test suite. In addition, you will learn to get to the bottom of what's causing flakiness in your tests, and to communicate with other engineering teams about those tests. Although everyone's application has its own quirks, and every organization has its own workflows, this talk aims to give advice that anyone can use in their own tests and when dealing with their fellow engineers. By the end of this talk, you will feel confident enough to debug your own flaky tests, and get to the fun part - writing new ones!
Here are some alternate presentation titles, for your amusement:
- Keep The Flakiness for Your Croissant: How to Un-Flake Your Automated Test
- Bake The Flake Out of Your Tasty Test Cake
- Flake It Off, Flake It Off: How to Un-Flake Your Flaky Test (T-Swift theme)
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