237: Sneak Peek of AutomationGuild 2019

Hit it.

Welcome to the Test Talks podcast, the place to go to geek out on software testing. And now your host whose mission is to help you succeed with test automation, Joe Colantonio.

Hey, it's Joe. And welcome to another episode of Test Talks. In this episode, we're going to take a behind the scenes look at Automation Guild 2019. So I'm going to share with you some previews of some upcoming sessions at the conference that's taking place on February 4th to the 6th. All online, no travel required. If you haven't registered already. Hopefully this episode will convince you to register to really accelerate your automation efforts in the new year.

Test Talks is sponsored by the fantastic folks at Sauce Labs, the cloud based automated testing platform that eliminates the need to maintain your own Selenium grid and test infrastructure. Try it for free today. Visit testtalks.com and click on the sign up now link under the Homepage Sponsor section.

So let's jump right into it. First speaker I'd like to introduce to the guild for the February 4th to the 6th conference is Nikolai Advakin. He's the founder of the popular blog and course site ultimate qa. And I also found out that he works for Sauce Labs. I think he's been working there almost half a year now. I didn't know, so that's really cool. Source Labs is our sponsor. So excited for Nikolai for for getting that new gig. And his session is going to be on achieving parallel test execution in automation, which is a very tough issue that I hear a lot of people struggling with most when I interviewed them here on test hooks.

In this video, I'm going to show you the four key strategies that you have to implement in order to be able to achieve parallel test execution in your test automation. In fact, these are the same exact strategies that we've used to get one of our clients to be able to execute over 50,000 automated tests per day. My name is Nikola Advalatkin. I'm a solution architect at Sauce Labs and CEO@ultimateqa.com let's go ahead and learn the four strategies that are going to help you with parallel test execution.

Thank you Nikolai for your awesome session. A few other things I wanted to really cover in this year's Automation Guild is tools that aren't Selenium. As I mentioned previously, I don't believe there's one tool that's perfect for every team, and this is not a knock against Selenium. Your team may be awesome at Selenium and it might be the right tool for your team. However, there's other tools that I've been hearing more and more about that some developers tend to like better than Selenium. So that's fine. That's cool. The more tools we have for different phases within the software development lifecycle, I think the better off we'll be. And if we have developers that like certain tools, why not let them use the tools that they like to use? And two of those tools, one is Jest and the other is Cypress. So for Jest, we have. Can't see Dodds talking on. Just a minute.

Hey, everyone, my name is Kent C. Dodds and this is Jest. A minute. We're going to be talking about Jest, the most delightful testing platform. I'm calling it a platform, and you'll see why. It is an amazing testing tool. So I like to start out my talks by giving expectations. So this is what we're going to be doing today. I'm going to give you an introduction to Jest, and I'm going to focus on the how, not the why. So we're not going to be getting into any philosophical or why do we do these things necessarily. You might kind of pick up a couple of those things. But my focus is going to be live coding. So with that understood, let's go ahead and take a look at what exactly we're going to be covering in this talk. So we've got our outline here. We're going to do a demo in this Getting Started project. So right here we have a really simple Getting Started where we're going to be adding Jest, installing it for the first time, adding our own test, and then we're going to add code coverage and see how. How easy it is for Jest to support code coverage. And then because any typical application is going to probably be using some sort of compiler like TypeScript or Babel, we're going to show you how to add support for those things with Jest and how Jest still maintains its really awesome code coverage support, even when you're compiling with Babel or TypeScript. And then we have our advanced examples. And with the advanced examples, we're going to take a look at Watch Mode, which is one of the features that really won me over. Watch Mode and the ease of code coverage were the two things that really won me over with Jest, especially Code coverage in combined with the compilation support. That was just. It was so easy and before it was so hard. So the Watch mode is amazing and I'm really looking forward to showing that. Showing you the Watch mode and then Mocking is another feature that I just love from Jest. It's something that always felt like a hack with all of the other solutions that I found until I landed with Jest. And so I'm really happy with the mocking solution that Jest provides. I'm looking forward to showing that to you. And then Snapshots is a feature that Jess kind of pioneered. And we'll take a look at what this is and how it can be useful. And then I've got a couple last.

Surprises for you and for Cypress we have Gleb joining us on what could probably be a controversial topic, which is stop using page objects and start using app actions. And he demonstrates all this within Cypress IO.

Hello everyone, this is Gleb Bakhmut. Hope you're enjoying this Automation Guild Online conference. I work for a company called Cypress IO that makes the best open source end to end test run. In my talk I will show how to go beyond page objects for web application testing. Instead, we think you should write your web app test using direct application actions, something Cypress IO Test Runner can do easily. Let's start.

Awesome. Thank you so much Kent and Gleb for your sessions and if you never attended a Guild conference before, what I do is ahead of time. I have the speakers record their sessions and then I edit those sessions and I make sure I have good audio quality on them and video quality. Then during the conference I stream them live and then I bring in the speaker live to take live Q and A. So you get the best of both worlds. You get the best quality session possible, followed by being able to ask these awesome experts questions live during the conference. So I think it's a great system. This is the sixth conference I put on so far. This is the third annual Automation Guild, but I put on other conferences. So over the years this seems to be the best method that people tend to like based on surveys after the conference. So if more developer centric tools aren't your cup of tea, you're still going to find something to help you and your team with your automation efforts. Because we have other speakers speaking on other topics and other tools I think are really going to help you with your automation. For example, we have Dimitri from reportportal IO talking about an AI powered test automation dashboard solution that I think is really slick and it's open source that you can easily get up and running to when your tests are done running to give you the ability to quickly triage your test automation and use machine learning behind the scenes to help accelerate that for You. Besides Dmitri, other tools we'll be covering are Karate and another tool called Ear Test. Now, Karate is only two years old, but it's gaining more and more popularity as time goes on to help people with testing APIs. And we're actually going to have the creator of Karate joining the guild first time ever. Peter Thomas will be joining us talking about microservice test automation made simple using Karate. Let's listen into his session.

Hello everyone and welcome to the session on Karate, the API test automation framework. Karate is open source, which means it is free for anyone to use. Even though it's implemented in Java, it doesn't require you to know much Java, you don't need to have much programming knowledge. And I think that's one of the reasons why Karate has proven quite popular. Even though it's a relatively new open source project, it has been around only for two years. I happen to be the creator of Karate and the reason I created Karate was because I strongly felt that the existing options at the time weren't good enough for what I wanted to do. I felt there had to be a better way and hopefully in this session I would like to explain what I mean by that.

And the other tool, Aertest will have Nomi Forever joining us. Nomi is one of the folks that actually helped develop this tool and it was I think originally developed to help test games. So it helps you automate really difficult apps. Not just games, but anything that's really difficult to automate. Currently with Selenium uses a bunch of different technologies like image based technology and Nomi really goes into detail on how to get up and running with it to use it to test an Android app, but you can use it against iOS apps, web apps. It's really flexible and hopefully this tool to gain more traction because I think it's going to help a lot of people with things that they normally can't automate using using Selenium out of the box. So definitely want to check this out.

Hello and the test links Naomi Ferreira and in this talk I would like to show you how to automate different types of applications, even the difficult ones, using a cross platform open source tool called Aetes Project so you can quickly take your automation efforts to the next level. Aertes Project was jointly launched between Netis Games and Google in the Google Developers Conference in March of 2018 and since it was featured in some of the biggest conferences in the area in China, it won the Open Source contribution award of 2018 by the Mobile Test Summit China. As you can See, this tool is fairly new. However, I'm very excited about it and I feel it's quite powerful. So I would like to really show it to you and hopefully you can also use it for your hardest applications. Our aim is to help you automate anything in a fast and durable way so you can save time and have a simple life. Let's get started.

Thank you Nomi for that awesome session on Ear Test. Besides tools, one of my main goals for anyone joining a Guild conference is that you learn a tip tool, best practice or technique that you could put into action right away after the conference is over to help you with your automation efforts. So in that spirit, we have a bunch of different sessions on best practices you can use to help either improve your test automation or to use with a new project. We have a bunch of these. For example, we have Angie Jones talking about Gherkin and how to create good gherkin for complex automation frameworks. We have Iona, she's going to be talking about test pyramids and a microservice architecture. We have Vinut, the test automation guru going over design patterns and test automation. That's been a very popular topic. We have Paul Grisaffi talking about Kieran feeding of cast iron, how it relates to automation. We also have Karina Pip talking about Intellij and these awesome shortcuts you can use to help you create automation code that's really reliable and robust using these awesome shortcuts that most people don't know about. So let's listen into a few of these awesome sessions on more general best practice type topics.

Hello Automation Guild, this is Angie Jones. Today I want to talk about behavior Driven development, the artifacts that result from that and how to utilize those for great test automation strategies. Let's jump right in. So Behavior Driven development is also known as BDD and it's an example based methodology for developing software. The key to BDD is the collaborative exercises between the business development and testers. These parties are collectively known as the Three Amigos. When beginning the work for a new feature, the Three Amigos, they get together and they write examples of how this feature will be used. And by discussing these examples, all parties come to a shared understanding of how the feature should behave in various scenarios. Let's take a peek into one of these meetings.

Hello Automation Guild and hello Internet. This is Paul Grisaffi from Medienic and we're going to be talking a little bit about cast iron and automation today. Why cast iron and automation? Well, there are some similarities there that we'll get to in just a couple of minutes. This is a picture of my mom's cast iron skillet. It's a nice little 6 inch pan. It's about 60 years old and it's been well taken care of. It's in fact she can even cook eggs in it with no fat. So no butter, no oil, no grease, no anything. And the eggs do not stick. Why? Because it was cared for carefully. It's got a nice slick surface. It's pretty much just like using a non stick pan. We'll contrast that with my pan. My pan is not nearly 60 years old and it wasn't quite cared for quite as well. You can see little spots of rust. That's a little orange bits in there. I wasn't as diligent with the maintenance as I should have been. I was really diligent with the, the upfront work, but not so much with the maintenance. And taking care of cast iron does require some upfront work and then it requires some ongoing care. We're going to talk very quickly about that and then we'll talk about how that maps into automation.

Hello, Automation, I'm Jana for Krashow. I've been an automation test engineer for the past eight years and lately I've been very, very interested in the entire delivery workflow and how we can build quality in as a team. Just as a heads up.

This is the first time I'm doing a recorded online session and actually the third time I'm doing any public speaking.

So thank you for the patience. Just in case I'm losing my words. My today's session is about the test pyramid. Actually scratch that is about the automation pyramid in a microservices architecture. I'll walk through some of the steps that we took after we started looking at the architecture of the system to understand better what automated checks we should add and most importantly, where. This session is not about how to automate scenarios as we have so many tools available there. And actually Automation Guild is a conference and a place where you can see so many examples, examples that might suit your needs, but instead we're going to focus more on the step that we should take before going into scripting and actually looking at what we should automate, why we should add those automated checks in the first place, and as I mentioned, most importantly, where we should add them to make sure they give us the best value after we implement them. So, shall we start?

Hi, my name is Ingmar. I'm from the Netherlands and I'm a test automation engineer by profession. I've been involved in testing since 2010 started as a manual tester. What will you see in this presentation? I will talk a bit about my view of being a test automation engineer. I will talk a bit about coupling, about thinking and concepts about how to communicate as a test automation engineer towards your team. And I will show some Java libraries that I use on a daily basis to improve my workflow and my code.

Awesome. So another topic we'll be covering is AI based technology that already baked into some of these tools that can help you in 2019. This is a big, big trend I've been seeing and I don't think it would be wise to ignore them. The more you learn about these things, you learn about what's true and what's not and it's best to focus on what they can actually do now and how they can help your team and implement them the right way. So we have a lot of sessions on AI based technology. For example, we have Adam Carmi talking about tips from the trenches, how they built and test AI at applitools. So that's going to be a cool session. We also have Tariq King talking about Test Machina demystifying AI driven testing bots. We have Jonathan Lips talking about evolving Appium image recognition and AI for mobile testing. We have a Ron Kinsbruner talking about future proofing testers in the age of AI machine learning and bots. We have Raj from Testim IO talking about smart and stable automation testing using AI based dynamic locators. So let's listen into some of the AI based sessions I think you should definitely get a handle on for 2019.

Hi everyone, my name is Eran Kinzbrunner. I'm a lead software evangelist at Perfecto. This is not my first time presenting at Automation Guild and I just wanted to create this very short introduction before starting my session this year. My session is going to cover machine learning techniques or how machine learning can help you evolve and and mature your testing practices for web and for mobile, talking about the different use cases. So I do hope that you like my session. I hope it contributes and adds value to your today and maybe even tomorrow's activities. And with that I'd like to thank Joe Colantonio for inviting me and you guys. I hope you make the most out of this conference. Thank you so much. Hello Automation Guild 2019. This is Jonathan Lips and I work on the Appium project as well as run a mobile automation consulting firm called Cloud Gray and I'm here today to talk to you about some of the new things we've done with Appium in the last year to help evolve Appium and bring its functionality into the future and to make your automation lives a bit easier. So let's get on with it. All right, so let's talk about image recognition and AI.

So that's a small sample of the awesome speakers and the awesome sessions you'll get when you register right now for Automation Guild. Head over to automationguild.com register today, you don't want to miss the live event going on February 4th to the 6th. Now, besides our awesome speakers, we have some awesome roundtables going on led by some of the biggest names in automation. For example, check out the experts that make up the roundtable. For day two we're going to have Dorothy Graham. Dorothy Graham is one of the biggest, well respected names in the automation space. She's been writing books since the 90s on automation, so she knows automation. She's going to be joining us live, so if you have any questions for her, you can ask her anything within the roundtable. We also have joining her Danny McGowan. Danny is an expert in automation as well. He's an architect for a very large company. He's been very successful implementing automation. And we also have Lisa Crispin in the house. So I think that is a killer roundtable for day two. And the next roundtable we have Paul Merrill. Paul Merrill's an automation expert. He also offers awesome automation testing consulting services, training. So you definitely want to check Paul Merrill out. And we have quoting quoding really his. I guess the latest thing he's been focusing on is API testing but he also has a lot of experience in mobile testing and also he has a cool plugin for sonar that he recently created for Selenium. So you definitely want to check that out. And we also have them joined by Geljeet from Excel Q. They have a cloud based CI testing platform. So this company knows a lot about automation. So as you can tell, our roundtable experts can handle any question you may have. Joining the guild just for that alone is well worth the money. So what other benefits you get from a Guild conference? First off, I call it not only a conference but a community. So you get access to a private Slack channel where we have an awesome group of folks that have been active all year long. So you get to learn about automation awesomeness before and after, during and long after the conference is over. You also get access to the Guild membership site where you can watch all these videos and anything that was that happened live will be recorded and uploaded to the site and you can watch them forever. You can download them and you can download the sessions and keep them local on your hard drive. You also get to meet experts from around the world. So a lot of times at conferences you don't necessarily get this type of mix of people from all over the world and you save a lot of time and money, especially money where you don't have to pay for airline tickets or hotel rooms. So it's really affordable. I actually did a quick spreadsheet comparing Guild conferences to three other of the top automation on site conferences. And Guild conferences are 90% more affordable compared to the 3 of the top automation on site conferences. I'm not saying you should choose one over the other. I love on site conferences, but not everyone has the luxury of going to an on site conference. Not everyone's a 1 percenter, right? How about automation for the rest of us? Right? That's what Automation Guild's all about. Head on over to automationguild.com, register today. Hope to see you there. So for links to everything of value we covered in this episode, head on over to testtalks.com 237 and and while you're there, make sure to click on that. Sign up for a free trial link under the exclusive sponsor section to learn all about Source Labs awesome products and services. So that's it for this episode of Test Talks. I'm Joe and my mission is to help you succeed with creating automation awesomeness. As always, test everything and keep the good. Cheers.

All right.

We got a call from our friend Jo. Said, how's it going? He said, hey yo, I got this.

Conference coming up before too long.

I was thinking maybe you guys could write the theme song. And that's how we ended up with this tune. If automation awesomeness makes you smooth, but that's the foundation on which you can build, you better get yourself to the Automation Gear.

Conference. That is automation, baby. Oh yeah.