Deep Dive with AutomationSTAR's Chris Loder, Janna Loeffler, Gáspár Nagy and Seb Rose

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. I'm calling today's episode Automation Pioneers Deep Dive with Automation Star's leading voices, Chris, Jana Gasper and Seb. If you don't know, Chris is the QA Automation Manager at Upland Software. With over 20 years of experience in automation, he leads a team designing automation frameworks and frequently speaks at global testing conferences. Currently, he's establishing a Center of Excellence for QA Automation at Upland, championing software quality and sharing his deep expertise in automation. Joining him, we have Jana, who is the Director of Engineering at Mharticle and she has over 15 years of experience in software quality and holds multiple degrees in computer engineering and Business administration. She has diverse roles in development, testing, QA and DevOps giving her a comprehensive understanding of software engineering, and she's also contributed to a bunch of different products ranging from industrial controls to theme park attractions, and always with the focus on enhancing software quality and efficiency. We also have the creator of SpecFlow joining us, Gasper, who is a seasoned software developer expert with over 20 years of experience. He's a regular conference speaker and blogger. He also is the editor of the BDD Addict newsletter and co authored books on behavior driven development. As an independent coach and trainer, Gasper specializes in helping teams Master BDD and SpecFlow. And last but not least, we have, with over 40 years of experience in the industry, Seb Rose, who has been a consultant, developer and analyst in the complete development life cycle. He's worked with giants like IBM and Amazon and has insights from successful and failed projects. Now he's an independent consultant and trainer. Seb is a regular conference speaker and author. He's known for the BDD Book series, the Cucumber of Java Book, and contributions to 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know. And before we get into this, must listen to Episode. Have you ever wanted to visit Europe or specifically Berlin, Germany? Or do you live nearby? Then this is your chance to attend in person the Automation Star conference, which is taking place in Berlin, Germany on November 20th to the 21st. So don't miss your chance to meet these speakers on the podcast in person and also learn from a bunch of other experts all about automation testing and Bonus Test Guild listeners get an extra 10% off tickets when they use the code TEST GUILF 10. And what's great is if you're listening to this podcast before midnight of October 6th, this discount will apply to the already low Early Bird special. And to get there, all you need to do is head on over to test guild.com.

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Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Guild.

Hello. Hello.

Hi.

Thanks for having us.

Hi, everyone.

Good to have you all to how to be the Longest in show ever. Before we get into it, I thought we'd dive into maybe what everyone's speaking at at the conference. Just to give a little tease why people should attend this event going on November 20th to 21st. So I'll probably pick on you, Jenna, since it looks like you're the busiest speaker of them all. I believe you're doing a tutorial on test automation strategies, a keynote on streamlining CICD pipelines with test automation, and I think you're giving a session on leadership. So, Jenna, little tease maybe for each one of those, what people will get when they join this event.

Yeah, so I really like the three different talks that I'm doing. The keynote really talks about CICD and the developer and tester experience and really how to enhance those. Because as teams go towards more cicd, what they're finding is that their test automation suites get bigger and bigger and bigger and then their build times take longer and longer. And so it's really about focusing on how to have a good strategy around that to make it a good experience for not only testers, but developers as well. And that really actually even plays into my tutorial. We'll start kind of digging deep into that. And what does the test automation strategy really look like when it comes to some of these complex systems? Kind of like we said in my intro, I've tested everything from web applications, mobile applications, to ride control software on cruise ships, a variety of things, a lot of different industries that can be hard to test. So how do you use test automation? How do you come up with a strategy? Where do you even start in some of those goofy situations? And Then lastly, I'm also talking about leadership because a lot of what I've attended conference and talked to other testers, other test automation engineers is they want to get into that team lead role. They want to go up through maybe people management, but they don't know how to get started, they don't know how to manage a team, how to do those effective one on ones, how to set goals, all of that. So it's just kind of a well rounded package there between the three talks.

Yeah, I love it. Strangely enough, leadership always comes up a lot with folks that attend the guild when they have questions, it tends to revolve around leadership. So I think it's an area that needs a lot of education. So I'm so thankful that you're doing this for sure. So people check, definitely attend to check that out. Just for that alone, when we talk, a tutorial. How long is the tutorials?

They're three and a half hours.

Three hours. Three, three and a half hours.

So Chris, you are the, I guess the one that put this all together. It sounds like maybe a little bit how that is done.

Yeah. So I was lucky to be asked to be the program chair for this year. Last year was the inaugural Automation Star was the first one. It was in Munich for those of you who were there. You know, it was an awesome, awesome conference and we're getting to do it again this year in Berlin, which is fantastic. So yeah, so as the program chair we get to go through all the submissions. Myself and my committee, John Kent and Sophie Kuster went through all the applications or submissions, I guess is a better word, sifted through them, went and put together a, what we like to think is a well rounded program. Everything from beginners to advanced folks to leadership to some soft skills. All of that's kind of in here. And it's what's great about this one is it's all about automation. And I love the fact because usually we're always tacked on to another conference. We're always tacked on to a testing conference, which I get it, we're automation testing. But it's nice to have one just dedicated for us because it's neat when you're sitting in a room and everybody there has the same problems as you. They have the same headaches, the same solutions, that sort of stuff. So it's kind of neat. So yeah, so we went through all of those, sifted through these wonderful fine folks, sifted through to the top with their tutorials and their talks and we have a lot of great speakers on the card for this for sure.

It is an excellent lineup and once again people can check it out by going to testskill.com star and you'll see all the speakers there as well. Chris, any quick tips for people when they're submitting a paper? Besides people asking me about leadership, it's always like, how do I become a speaker? How do I get chosen? What makes these things really pop for you? Any quick tips on that?

Be thorough, but not too thorough. All right, I know because I have to be honest. We saw everything from some submissions, had four whole lines to them.

Wow.

You want to convey what it is people are going to get from your talk. What are they going to walk away from? Also helps to say what problem you're trying to solve or you have solved.

Right.

And look and see what else is out there. Make sure you're not stepping on, you know, you're not trying to do the exact same thing that somebody else has already done 20 times or 50 times. But yeah, and well worded. Take the time, check your grammar, believe it or not, check, check your grammar and have it all make sense and be cohesive, which is another big thing. You know, start with the problem you're trying to solve, talk about what you're going to do in your talk, how you're going to hopefully come about that, and then what people are going to walk away with. Those key things are important.

Another big thing is, you know, if you are going to talk about something that people have already talked about, put your unique spin on it, you know, point out why is it different than, you know, another talk that you've heard and what problem, what makes it special to you?

Great advice. Awesome. So Gaspar, obviously you wrote a proposal that really popped. Ramping up, testing solution, test automation patterns. This is probably an area I think a lot of people miss out on is patterns. So maybe you could talk a little bit about your session.

Yeah, so actually our workshop and the session is somehow related to each other. But my background is software development and now I'm quite much in the testing space and I think test automation is quite a good mix of that. So I can really enjoy both of my kind of sites. And I learned about patterns and when I was working as a software developer and when I was getting into the automation space, I was somehow missing that kind of guidance that we had for software developers. And yeah, of course there are some patterns available, but those kind of things that every developer knows kind of those doesn't exist. And so I started to talk to other people how what kind of other things they are doing. And I also was trying to figure out what kind of patterns would work in testing, how much they are different from the patterns that we use in software development. And basically it was a long time wish to make something out of that. And when I talked to this about this topic with Seb, he was very quickly get code by that and so we started to work together on that. And basically in the talk I would like to talk a little bit about the importance of the patterns. What is it a pattern for a testing team, for a test automation team, and how to figure out what kind of patterns might be useful to focus on and extract from your existing code base, what kind of benefits you might get from that and how that would work. So that's basically what the talk is covering. So generally about how cool testing patterns are. So that's what test automation patterns are.

Awesome. And as Gaspar mentioned, Seb, you're doing a joint tutorial on exploring BDD automation patterns. Maybe a little tease. Like any automation patterns in BDD you think people definitely should know and to learn really more about it, they should definitely check out your session at autostar.

Yeah. So. Well, Gaspar and I write, have written two books already in the BDD books series. The first one was on Discovery, second one's on formulation and there's no surprise that the third one's going to be on automation. It's going to be a crowdsourced book of patterns from not just Gasper myself, but from other BDD practitioners. And this is sort of, I guess what we're going to be doing is trial running some of the patterns that we've already mined from the community ones that we've identified and I guess as a teaser and I'm, you know, as a tease, because we haven't finally, finally decided which ones we're going to put in yet, but because we have too many, right? We've got 50 patterns to choose from and we're going to do two or three maybe at the workshop. But for instance, a lot of people have problems writing scenarios in Gherkin that are less than 50 lines long, shall we say? And the goal of Gherkin scenario, we expect them to be brief, we expect them to be five lines or fewer. And many, many people have problems. They go. But there's so much more that I need to say in this scenario to get it to the point where we can actually run anything. I'm pretty sure we'll be showing a pattern that shows the general way of working to get to condense complicated things into a single line, but a single meaningful line that conveys the information without swamping people in the details. I mean, I guess one of the things you should point out about patterns. We don't know who's listening to this podcast, do we? Patterns are not best practices. Right. Patterns are approaches or techniques that are applicable in some context and have some ramifications when you apply them. So there's preconditions about before you can apply them or use them for each pattern. And then there are considerations you should have about the resulting context once you have applied them. So there's. They're more complicated than a best practice because best practices don't really exist.

Oh, that's a can of worms you could open up, Seth.

Yeah, right. For sure.

I like it.

Yeah, for sure. So I'm always curious to get people's opinions as well as. Not only is these awesome sessions and we talked a little bit what speakers can do to make a good session, but what can attendees do? You've all spoken at conferences all over the world and sometimes it's a good investment to send someone to a conference. Are there any suggestions you give to an attendee what they can do to maybe get the most of an actual on site conference? I don't know if anyone has any strong opinions to kick this off.

Yeah, I have a strong opinion. Okay, don't just read the title, okay, read the talk description because you might end up going somewhere where you either you know it all already or you don't want to know it at all. So don't just go on the title. And the other thing I would suggest is don't just go to places where you already know everything you're there to learn. So push yourself a bit. Go out of the envelope, go to things that you wouldn't normally learn about.

And I'd like to piggyback on that because it's one of the things I tell people when I'm talking is if my talk is not for you, it's not resonating with you in those first. If I don't have you in the first five to 10 minutes, I will not be offended if you get up and go to another session I want you to get the most out of. You spent a lot of money to come hear people talk and I want you to get the most out of it. So I will not be offended if my talk is not what you need or what you're looking for today. Go to Janice, go to Sebs, go to Gaspers, go to Somebody's that you think will give you a little bit more that day or that particular session.

I have thin skin. That's why I don't speak.

But Jenna, I have thin skin too. So I tell people. I mean, I literally start out every presentation saying, you know, we're all adults in the room. We need to use bathroom, we need to take phone calls, we have meetings. So if you get up, if you have to do this, just get up, excuse yourself. It's okay. Because that way too, if you're leaving because you don't like my talk, I just think you're going to the bathroom.

So I like that.

So good. When I started going to conferences, the first thing that I learned is that especially the best if you are going alone, but if you are going with colleagues, try to just act like you wouldn't even know each other to go to different sessions. Don't stick together all the time, because if you are in a group, it's much harder to meet other people. And at least for me, in every conference, talking to other people is almost just as much value that I get than what I get from the talks. Sometimes the talks are just good for discussion starters. Maybe you hear something, you want to discuss it with someone. Of course you can come to the speakers. And we are also generally happy to have some afterwards conversation. But talking with the other attendees is also very valuable. And therefore you have to force yourself to step out your comfort zone and just meet someone. That's why we are serving coffee. I think that you just can just ask. You need to ask that. Can I just sit next to you or whatever, stand next to you? That's the conversation starter. But just don't stop here.

And we do have a lot of networking breaks at the conference as well. Lunches, coffee breaks. Another big thing to remember about conferences, bring an appetite. There's always usually lots of food and good food at conferences, so don't forget that. But yeah, there's a lot of tested network. And that's how I met Jenna, many, many years ago. And just talk to people.

Yeah, this is also how I met Seb. I think so. I think we met in conferences.

Oh, really? Cool.

Yeah. I have a couple of friends that I made at conferences, and eight, nine years later, we're still friends. We still run into each other at conferences, things like that. I think the big thing to remember too is that speakers are people too. So I've gone to conferences where people have been afraid to go up to speakers because, like, oh, my goodness, there's like this aura or thing around being a speaker? No, we're people, we like to have conversations. We don't know everything, but we're a good way to help network you for people who may know what we don't know. So I always encourage people to go up to speakers and to go up to other people because even if they can't answer your question, usually somebody in the conference can. And that's kind of how you figure it out and get your questions answered.

And speaking of questions, don't be afraid to raise your hand and ask a question.

Right? Great point. Love it. So I think you're also all doing tutorials. I think that's another thing sometimes people trip on. I don't know if it's because I'm older. Like I used to go to a tutorial and people have a computer, they couldn't get anything installed. I know nowadays we containers and everything. If that made it easier. Like is there anything people need to do to prepare for a tutorial to make sure that you're not waiting for someone to catch up, getting their machine ready to do whatever you're trying to.

Teach them, read the instructions and follow them. I'm not giving this tutorial now, but I have another tutorial where I walk people through building a framework. And yes, I guarantee one or two people always show up with nothing in stock. Be ready to start because it only helps you when you're there and it just doesn't derail you or your chance to learn because you're spending your time installing the IDE or installing the drivers or whatever.

Yeah. On the other hand, I think we all have seen that and we are all somewhat prepared on. Prepared for unprepared people. So don't worry if you're, I mean if, if it happened because your machine was just broken down and you had to replace it in the morning before or so maybe you wanted to follow the instructions but you couldn't just pair up with someone. So in many cases it doesn't really matter who is actually typing. If you are doing that together, it's almost the same or maybe even better learning experience at the end. So if I would jump in with this situation to a specialist for a three hours tutorial, I wouldn't waste my time on installing. I would just pair up with someone and enjoy the session like that.

Great. So also, I don't mean to put you all on the spot here, but this just popped in my head. Usually when I go to. If I'm speaking at it, which I really do, if I speak At a conference, I usually go just to hear other speakers. So I don't know if any of you had a chance to look at the lineup yourself. Any other sessions of speakers you're excited to see that maybe we could help highlight as well.

Edit.

Edit hard.

So I was happy that I got to do a tutorial, but I was also really sad because I was signed up for Gasper's tutorial.

That is the drawback. Sometimes as a speaker, we don't get to go because Jenna has delivered several that I'd love to have gone to attend in the past and never been able to because I'm always doing my own. Right. That is one of the drawbacks of being a speaker is you miss out on some of the conference because you're. You're doing the talk. And yeah, I would love to be in Janice tutorial. I'd love to be in 7 Gaspar's tutorial, but I have to deliver my own.

I know Andy Knight is doing a tutorial, and his tutorials are always really good. Is he doing a talk too? Chris?

Yeah, he does.

Yes. He's doing a tutorial on playwright. Getting started with that, which is kind of neat. Yeah. Like, we have, like, it's hard to pull some people out and say, you know, ones that have me excited because they all have me excited. I really cannot wait for this conference because there's going to be so much good content here. We have great keynotes. All the keynotes are spectacular. The one, Ryan Volker. I met Ryan in 2018 at Eurostar. He came to my talk, I went to his talk. We just kind of hit it off and have somewhat stayed in touch over the past few years. And when I became program chair, and I know that Ryan's a great speaker, I reached out and asked if he had anything he'd like to share. And I'm really looking forward to his keynote with Bastian on their automation journey, because I know that in 2018, he was just getting started on that journey when we met at Eurostar. So really looking forward to that.

No offense to Seb and Gaspar, too. I tend to go to talks with people who don't have blogs or don't have books because I want to get to know them and kind of get a better idea of who they are. And sometimes I feel like, well, if I, you know, I can read the book or I can go to the blog. So sometimes getting those new speakers or those new perspectives are fun.

We will revoke it right away.

You have the chance to buy the Last copies, maybe. And then.

So, Chris, I guess that also goes to planning. Is this a single track session or is it multi tracks? And how do you plan to make sure that there is an overlap where people have to choose? Like, I want to learn about bdd. So there's three sessions going on at the same time. I assume it takes a lot of planning to make sure there's no conflicts like that.

It did.

We had a big giant board where we moved people so that we didn't have too many conflicts. We are multi track, I believe on. I think we have depends. We have four tutorials, I believe five.

Nine.

Five now.

Five now. That's right. Janice has been added. And then I think we have three sessions Monday morning. I think there's five Monday afternoon. But yeah, so there is a lot for everybody. But yeah, it took a lot of. Well, we can't have these guys talking about the same thing at the same time. Or this is very close to this one. Someone who wants to do this one may want to go to that one as well. But John and Sophie and myself and the wonderful ladies at the Eurostar conferences there helped us put it together. And I think there should be enough for everybody in every time slot. It should be something that everybody wants to go to. If you want bdd, it's there. If you want to go talk about AI, it's in another one. So there's all that kind of stuff. So it should be fun.

Do you know how many sessions of speakers there are in total, Chris?

That's a darn good question. But I can count them because I actually have the thing open for me. Like I said, we've got five tutorials, three keynotes, eight talks on day one and another.

11 on day two. And then we also have something called lightning talks. So we'll have five speakers all get five minutes to do a little bit of a little lightning keynote. Those are always fun. When you only give people five minutes to get a point across. It's always fun to see. See what they come up with in those five minutes.

Especially for automation, this is quite challenging.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. So I thought I'd go around the room. I usually end a podcast by telling, give me one piece of actual advice. You can help someone with their automation testing efforts. Maybe we'll mix it up. Give me one piece of actual advice you think someone will walk away from from your session that you think is worth attending for that alone. So I'll go in order for where I'm seeing people like Gasper.

Okay, so yeah. My advice would be just get your development buddy, sit together, go through your automation code and find a few patterns that you would like to reuse and maybe have a proper solution, proper way of handling for that.

For me, my tutorial is about building an automation framework, so something to take away would be make it maintainable. I talk about different ways of making it maintainable because if it can't be maintained, it's going to die on the vine like many, many frameworks have before. So you'll come away with some ideas on how to make your framework more maintainable.

I would say test automation is not just about code, it's about experiences and it's the tester experience and the developer experience. So really learning how to use test automation to enhance those experiences and make it make coding fun for people.

Well, I guess I'm going to say we're going to deliver all three of the things that so far been mentioned at our workshop because we're going to show you how to write a maintainable gherkin that's easy to read and therefore has a good experience for developers and other non technical stakeholders.

If you're into test automation, this is the conference for you. Come be surrounded by like minded individuals. We're all there wanting to learn. It's going to be a great conference. Last year's was an excellent conference. This year will only be better. We've expanded the program over last year's. The ladies at the in the office tell me that the venue is spectacular. So I think yeah, just go out and buy your tickets now. Just do it. It's going to be an absolutely great conference and I really look forward to seeing everybody there.

Awesome. And once again, don't miss your chance to meet these speakers on the podcast in person, live in the flesh. As they mentioned, don't be afraid to go out and ask them some questions in person. It's always encouraged. And also you get to learn from a bunch of other experts about automation testing at Automation star, taking place November 20th to the 21st in Berlin, Germany. And bonus, test skilled listeners because you listened all the way to the end. Get an extra 10% off tickets when you use the code TESTGILL Guild10. This will also be in the show notes, so just head on over to test guild.com star and register today. So another bonus Justin is also if you go attend Autos Automation Star and you meet Gasper and Seb, they also will have some copies of their books available on bdd. I highly recommend you check them out. They've been on the podcast before talking about them. They're awesome. Go to resources and they may even sign them for you. So just another benefit of attending an on site event. You get some books and signed books as well. Thanks again for your automation awesomeness. The links to everything of value we covered in this episode. Head on over to testguild.com a465 and if the show has helped you in any way, why not rate it and review it in itunes? Reviews really help in the rankings of the show and I read each and every one of them. So that's it for this episode of the Test Guild Automation Podcast. I'm Joe. My mission is help you succeed with 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@testguild.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 test guild.info and let's make it happen.