Call for Speakers and Guild Courses

Get ready to discover the most actionable end to end automation advice for some of the smartest testers on the planet. Hey, I'm Joe Calantonio, host of the Test Guild Automation Podcast and my goal is to help you succeed with creating automation awesomeness.

Hey it's Joe and welcome to another episode of the Test Guild Automation Podcast. First, I want to let you know that I just opened up the call for speakers for the seventh annual Online Event Automation Guild that will take place February 6th to the 10th of 2023. So if you're an expert in anything to do with DevOps, automation testing, performance testing, site reliability or security, we want to hear from you. All you need to do is go to guildspeaker.com that's guildspeaker.com and enter in the info for your presentation idea. Once I have enough submissions, I'll run an anonymous poll to the guild and have them vote on what sessions they want to hear for this event. I highly encourage you to submit your idea. Now I also have been working on trying to improve the testguild.com site. I still get a lot of folks tell me they don't know I even have a podcast or other podcast on performance or a new show or webinars or online events. So I'm trying to make it easier for folks to find all that awesome free resources that we now provide. And the way to do that. All you need to do is go to test guild.com and check out all the free resources under the main menu item or also on that main page on test skill.com we have a Start here section that points out the podcast area and also the free courses. So if you haven't taken advantage of these resources, I highly recommend you do. And all you need to do is go to testskill.com and if you have any comments on how I can make it better or make it more laid out in a way that people understand it better, let me know. Drop me a line@joestguild.com so along those lines I want to share with you some insights taken for some of our free course offerings that are continually growing this catalog in case you haven't seen them yet. So let's listen in and hopefully you'll get some value. And to actually see these courses, all you need to do once again is go to tiskill.com, click on the training menu and on that dropdown you'll see an option for courses and that's where you'll see all our courses listed. As I mentioned, they're continually growing. So hopefully if you have any idea for suggestions on courses that you'd like to see, also drop me a line as well.

The Test Guild Automation Podcast is sponsored by the fantastic folks at Source Labs, the cloud based test platform that helps ensure you can develop with confidence at every step from code to deployment. For Every framework, browser, OS, mobile device and API, get a free trial, visit testguild.comsourcelabs and click on the Exclusive Sponsors section to try it for free today. Check it out.

Hi, I'm Simon Stewart, I'm the lead of the Selenium project and I'm here to talk to you about using Selenium 4 in anger. After what feels like far too long a delay, the betas for selenium 4 are now available. So I'd like to take this opportunity to talk to you about the new user facing features that are an important part of this release.

All the examples I give today are going to be in Java, but don't worry, all the features are also available for every other language we support.

Now before we get started, let's take a look at how Selenium works. I think we're all familiar with the architecture of Selenium, right? I mean, it's basically you talking to your browser. Your test communicates directly with the browser. That's all there is to it, isn't it? What actually happens is your test talks to a driver executable, maybe Gecko driver, maybe Chrome driver, maybe Safari driver, and that talks to the browser. That means that Selenium only needs to speak the W3C WebDriver protocol and not the specific protocols that each of the browsers understands.

Of course.

Doesn't end there, does it? Sometimes we want to be able to run our tests remotely, maybe we're developing on a Mac, but we'd like to be able to run our test on Windows machine so we can make use of the Selenium server. This runs on the remote machine, connects to the driver executable, and that drives a browser.

Great.

We're done, right? Well, not really. One of the things we want to do is to parallelize our test so we can run more at the same time than would fit on a single machine. To do this, we can use Selenium Grid or a Selenium as a service provider to provide that capability.

Thank you Simon. And to check out that full course, all you need to do is head on over to testguild.com, click on the Training Courses section and you'll see a course by Simon Stewart called Selenium 4 Quick start.

Hello everyone. Thank you for joining me today as we talk about Kobiton and making the move to automation. With Kobiton to start, we will do an intro to the Kobiton platform and we'll move forward from our first lesson of manual testing, moving into our next lesson of using scriptless automation. Before we start, just a little bit about me. My name is Shannon Lee. I have spent the past five years in my career as a quality engineer, then turned developer evangelist, now solutions engineer at Kobiton. I have worked in the space of DevOps as well as agile testing for most of my career, including all functional and non functional testing, including automation as well when it comes to testing web applications and mobile applications and anything in between. Okay, so for the agenda for these lessons, one, I would love to show you just a quick overview of the different types of testing in the mobile application testing space. So that's going to include functional testing, non functional testing, and here I'll introduce what we call visual testing that is quite just a smidge different from the other two. I also want to touch briefly on emulators and simulators, first using real devices when testing your mobile application and then followed by an intro to Kobiton. So who we are, what we do, as well as how you can leverage Kobiton as a manual tester.

From there, Kobiton offers artificial intelligent, excuse me, artificial intelligence driven scriptless automation. So we'll dive into what exactly is scriptless and no code automation. And then I'll show you all how you can create your own device bundles in Kobiton using real devices and execute scriptless automation without having to write a single line of code. From there we also have what we call our validations. So these are validations that are going to be flagged in the realms of functional and non functional testing that allows the AI to help catch more defects for you in a short amount of time.

All right, thank you Shannon for that. And that was taken from Shannon's course on making the move to automation. Although it highlights a lot of the features of Kobiton, it does go over things that are timeless to anyone regardless of what solution you're using. Like she gives a really good intro to scriptless automation, a good intro of how to get started with Appium. She talks about Kobiton's approach to automation. And I also included in this course a quick start Training on Appium 2.0 from Jonathan Lips himself. So a lot of value there as well and definitely check out that course.

Hi everyone, thanks for Joining in for this session. So in this session we are going to talk all about accessibility. But before getting started, let me just give you a brief introduction about myself. Hi everybody. I'm Prabhati Sharma and I hail from Delhi, which is the capital of India. I've been working in the corporate industry for the past 4.5 years now a little more than that as a quality engineer, quality consultant. Currently I'm working with ThoughtWorks as a senior quality consultant. So I'll be very honest. So when I started working on accessibility, I clearly understood that it is an underdog because we do not talk much about it. But it is so very important for us as engineers, as a development team for the company, for the organization and for the clients and customers. So I guess it's the right time for us to pay heed and attention to accessibility testing as well. And this is what this session is all about. So let me first get you well versed with what is accessibility and why do we need it? So starting off with the whys. So whenever we talk about something being accessible, it simply means that it is easily understandable and easily obtainable. So if I say that I want to make a platform which is accessible, it would simply mean that everybody around the world should be able to access it with or without disabilities. Also, 20% of the world population is disabled. So that makes a huge part of the entire user base. And we definitely need to be cognizant about their needs as well. Let me just give you a very relatable example of how accessibility is not only targeted to a specific group, but on a holistic level. It increases the user experience by multifold. So you would have seen wherever we have staircases, we have ramp adjacent to that. So the primary motive of that ramp is for people who travel via wheelchairs. But whenever you go to subways, you would see that more than 50% of the population is using ramp instead of the staircases for going up and going down. So why is that happening? So the ramp, which was actually made to solve an accessibility pain point, essentially increased the user experience and people were more happier using the ramp instead of the stairs, because using stairs like is a lot of effort for them.

So in a similar fashion, let's jump onto the other aspect of it, which is why do we need accessibility?

Again for this I would give you a real world example. So there is a very famous streaming company. I would not be taking the name, but in 2016 heavy lawsuit was actually filed against this company because it did not have the closed caption so this lawsuit was filed by the national association of Deaf because their community and the people who could not hear were actually not able to absorb the content on that streaming website.

And because of this, the company had to actually incur a cost of $750,000. And they were made to sign a contract which said that within two years they need to make 100% of the content with closed captioning by incorporating closed captioning to their content. So in this example, Title 3 of ADA, which is Americans with Disability act, was violated because of which this entire lawsuit happened at the first place. So this was something which is very specific to America. But then different nations have different federal laws. Supposedly uk it has its own federal law, it goes by the name of Discriminations Disability Act. Then in India we have another law which is Rights of Persons with Disability Act. So now wherever you are and wherever you're deploying your product, you need to make sure that you are actually abiding to the laws of that particular nationality. And this is what makes accessibility all the more important for us to abide to. As quality analysts, we need to make sure that our products are accessible by one and all at the same time, we need to make sure that we are able to give a faster feedback for any kind of accessibility violations so that the team is able to handle that in a timely fashion. At the end, it's very important for us to automate this entire process so that the overall regression becomes way more easier for us. So let's just dive right in.

Thank you Pargadi for that. And this is a really interesting session because it covers two very popular topics nowadays and that one is accessibility testing and the other one is actually how to do accessibility testing using Cypress. So if you want to be up to speed on the latest and greatest, definitely check this out for actionable ways to implement accessibility testing using Cypress and some plugins that Cypress has to help you with accessibility testing.

Hi everyone and thank you for joining us for the Tricentis QTest trial course. So this session is for you if you are looking for a more effective way to plan, manage, execute and track your testing. For example, if you're still on spreadsheets or using some other internal wikis to track your tests. This is a great tool and a course for you to go through if you need to drive some closer collaboration between development teams with QA and Test and the requirements and defects you might be tracking. Also a great course for you if you're looking for ways to get more value out of the test Automation and investments you've already made. Maybe you've got a lot of open source tools or other purchases that you've made for test automation and looking for a way to just get more mileage and value out of that. And if you need some more powerful reporting analytics on the testing that you're already running, whether you've got a lot of KPIs across a larger org or just need some real time insights into what's going on, this is going to be a great course in the next hour for you. So by this time hopefully you're a little familiar with what Tricentis QTest is. It is a test management solution that will help you with all of those things and all of those needs that you're going through. You can centrally manage all of your test plans in one place. It gives you support for waterfall and agile development and testing methods or any hybrid methodology. It will help you scale and orchestrate your automated testing and give you some of those real time insights you might be looking for as well.

So QTest is actually made up of a few different modules. This heart of it is really going to be QTest manager, which is where your core test case management, planning, tracking, doing some of your execution and some initial reporting will live. In this course today we will also go through Launch, Pulse and Insights, which are different application modules that feed into Manager and this helps you manage and centralize your automation, manage your DevOps workflows, and work with analytics and reporting tools as well. While we won't cover it today, we also help you manage manual test data manager, exploratory testing and give you a JIRA plugin for behavior driven development.

What can you expect in the next 60 minutes? My colleagues Andres and Simon will walk through the course today and we'll start with Manager and test case Management. After that we'll pass things over to Simon and he'll go over managing test automation and some of the DevOps workflows with both Launch and Pulse. Then we'll head back and check back in with Andres who can walk you through analytics and Reporting with Tricentis QTest.

So what might you need to get started? So to actually follow along and be hands on with the next 60 minutes you absolutely need a Tricentis QTest account. If not, you can just sort of follow along. But there is a free signup available and a free 14 day trial available@tricentis.com head to the upper right corner demos and trials and we'll get you set up right away in one of our SaaS instances. It's nice to have to follow along with automated tests and the DevOps portions that Simon will be going over. But if you don't have have these in place, having automated tests and automated hosts are nice to have so you can be hands on with the content either way. You can also find some example workflows and how things work at the Tricentis GitHub page at GitHub.com tricentis and you'll want to navigate to the qtest.integration. pulse repo within there. With that I'm going to hand things over to my colleague Andres who will get you started with QTest Manager.

So a question I get asked all the time is how can I get better with test management, especially for DevOps? How can I help my automation efforts? Well, one tool that comes up a lot is QTest and as you may have noticed by now is our courses cover not only open source but also vendor based testing from an independent point of view. So we're an independent company. It's really I'm a one person company and I work with any tool, test, tool solution, a vendor, whether it's open source or or vendor or paid. Because I think it's up to you to decide what is best for you and your team. Your team may work best with some open source solutions, a more enterprise type team may do better with vendor based solutions. I like to present all the options out there and you, the guild decide based on the information we provide. And I think QTest is a great option for you for test management. So if that sounds like something that sounds good to you once again head on over to testguild.com and and check out our training courses section to learn more about Test Management for DevOps course using Tricentis QTest.

Hey everyone. Hi, it's Mark Tomlinson welcoming you to advanced performance exploration, which is very interesting to me as a topic because I do a lot of intro classes and I teach a lot of people the basics of thinking and conceptual understanding. And there's two things that I hear a lot of people ask to learn more about is one how do you actually go about when something slow we talk about tools like profiling tools and Dynatrace. How do I actually get my hands dirty digging in and finding problems and fixing problems and things like that. So the actual exploration, the act of exploring a system to figure out what the root cause of the problem is. That's, that's exploration and of course exploratory testing or general software testing in an exploratory fashion is a very popular thing. So why can't we apply that to performance? I actually did.

Another version of this that's not as hands on back at a cast many years ago, but it was very conceptual and it was all just torturing you with PowerPoint. So why would I want to do that again? So welcome to performance exploration, advanced performance exploration. And hopefully you'll enjoy this mix of some white. So I have those set up over here, plus we'll go through some screenshots and hands on things about digging around different systems. I have a couple VMs and I have some stuff for my work that I can show you. But generally the introduction to performance exploration is, you know, any good basics of the question should be what is performance exploration? And to be honest, the answer is it's the act of finding a bottleneck. Right? Finding a performance bottleneck. And by saying finding a performance bottleneck, I actually mean. And by saying finding a performance bottleneck, I actually mean the thing that is causing the slowdown. At least in that first stage of your exploration, you may find the first thing that's slow is the connection from your mobile device to the web server. And then once you fix that, you would actually figure out what's wrong with the web server under load and then you would progressively move forward. Some people call it peeling away the layers of the onion. Some people call it chasing your tail around the system, which is very fun. So in that nature, it's very iterative. So when I say exploring performance, keep in mind that the act that we're going to talk about today is looking, finding, fixing, then looking again and repeating the process until you're sure that you can handle performance from end to end. So it's also very iterative, which most exploration, the act of exploration is that you take one step and you learn what you learn and then you cultivate the next step and the next step and the next step as the context changes. So for you to be prepared for today's session one, you need to be curious and you also need to be motivated by dissatisfaction, which means the system could never be fast enough or you're a little bit skeptical about, well, you know, I know that's a pretty good fix, but I think we can get it to go faster. I think we can scale to handle more load or handle more users. So you want to be curious and you want to be a skeptic slightly dissatisfied with however fast the system is going. The other thing that I really encourage you to do, and I'll do some Hands on and different tools. And I'll move pretty quickly in the video is for you to be leveraging resource monitoring tools. And by resources I mean in the next section we'll talk all about what the different kinds of resources that you need to explore. So if you were going to go into the jungle, you need to know how to identify with different tools, what kinds of plants, what kinds of insects, what kinds of animals, and what other kinds of natural resources there are in your exploration. So as you're exploring, we want to talk about resources. You will need access to do this properly to some of the resource monitoring tools. The other thing I'll say is that it actually demands that you be both creative and analytical at the same time. So you need to be able to think about the system architecture and we'll talk a lot and we'll visualize a lot of that. In fact, I'll go to the board right now and kind of go over some of sort of the whys and whens of exploration. But think about being creative. So you're using, let's say, one part of your cognitive capabilities and then analytical thinking, which is the other part of your cognitive capabilities, which is sort of the fascinating thing about being a performance person.

So once again, thank you Mark for this course. Awesome, awesome stuff. If you don't know Mark, you definitely need to follow him and the folks at perfbytes. I know I talk about this all the time, but I actually started my career basically as a performance engineer and it's really near and dear to my heart. And it's funny, after 25 years or so, performance is becoming more mainstream, that testers also have to be more cognizant of performance issues and how their applications are performing, especially on the front end. So if this is something that you're dealing with, I think everyone needs to be aware of performance. This is a great hands on course that shows you how to find bottlenecks, fix root causes of problems, profiling tools to help you to troubleshoot when something is slow. It's not just, you know, hardcore performance testing, it's performance exploration for testers. So definitely check out this valuable resource.

Hello everyone. Welcome to Kobiton's second course here on Test Guild. Within this course we're actually going to look at AI and automation and an intro to Kobiton's Intelligent quality suite and automation solutions. My name is Shannon Lee. I am the solutions engineer for Kobiton with a focus of dev evangelism. So helping to bring the good word of technology to you all. And hopes to really help in your productivity within your mobile test automation efforts.

So quick agenda for this course. So in the first chapter we'll we'll do an intro into Kobiton's Intelligent Quality Suite. Then in chapter two, we'll move on to how AI supporting scripted automation. So in our previous course that we've done, we actually took a look at scriptless automation and how AI can come into play via scriptless. So within this course we'll actually take a look on how AI can support scripted automation, specifically Appium scripts. Moving on from that, we'll take an intro into the other scripted frameworks. So the native frameworks such as Espresso for Android applications and X UI test for iOS applications. And then after in chapter four, we'll actually take a look at we'll introduce Combaton's feature called Virtual USB that allows you to connect within any ide, say xcode or Android Studio code, be able to connect to a real device, even a remotely hosted real device.

All right, and that's our last course. Sneak peek. Once again, this is from the folks at Kobiton. It's on a topic I think everyone asks about or wants to know more about, and that is AI and automation. And once again, even if you don't use Kobiton or don't think it's the right solution for your current needs, this tutorial covers crucial concepts like how you can use AI to support your scripted automation, which most certainly will help you better understand what AI machine learning can do. That can really help you understand what AI and machine learning really can do to improve your current test suites. And once again, to get your hands on all these free courses, all you need to do is go to test skill.com, click on training and then click on Courses. And this will pull up all the courses for you. And if you have an idea for a course, let me know. Or if you're a company, or if you're a company that has a tool of service, you can actually benefit the Guild Drop me a line at joe@testguild.com and let's talk how we could create a course for you to help highlight the benefits it can provide. Our awesome community. For links of everything of value we covered in this episode, head on over to test guild.com a415 and while you're there, make sure to click on the Try for Free link under the exclusive Sponsor section to learn all about our awesome sponsor Sauce Labs products and services. So that's it for this episode of the Test Guild Automation podcast. I'm Joe. My mission is to help you succeed in creating end to end full stack automation awesomeness. As always, test everything and keep the good. Cheers. Hey, thanks again for listening. If you're not already part of our awesome community of 27,000 of the smartest testers, DevOps and automation professionals in the world, we'd love to have you join the fam@testguilds.com and if you're in the DevOps automation software testing space, or you're a test tool provider and want to offer real world value that can improve the skills or solve a problem for the guild community, I'd love to hear from you. Head ON over to testguild.info and let's make it happen.