Sneak Peek Automation Guild 2020 Online Conference

Five, four, three, two, one. Drop that. Welcome to the Test Guild Automation Podcast. We're all getting together to learn more about software testing and automation with your host, Joe Calantonio.

Hey, it's Joe. And welcome to another episode of the Test Guild Automation Podcast. Today I'm going to give you a sneak peek into into the fourth annual Online Conference Automation Guild 2020. It's the largest online conference in the world, dedicated 100% to helping you succeed with creating end to end automation awesomeness. The event's taking place February 3rd to the 5th. You have to check out our awesome lineup. If you haven't seen it yet, head on over to GuildConferences.com and click on the Register now button to learn more about the 2020 event taking place on one week from the release of this episode. So today I'm going to share with you a sneak peek at some of the sessions of what you're going to be learning at this year's event. And I really believe that this is an awesome way for you and your teams to start off the new year right by learning a tip, tool, technique or best practice that's going to help accelerate your automation efforts in the new year. And we also have a money back guarantee that if that if you can honestly tell me you didn't learn a tip, tool, technique or best practice that's going to help you, you get a full refund. So it's a can't miss low cost option to keeping you up to speed on the latest and greatest in automation. You don't want to miss the shares event. Head out over to Guild Conferences.com and click on Register now or probably an easy way to remember is go to HTTP Automation Guild and that will redirect you to Guild conferences.

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All right, so every year I survey past Automation Guild attendees and ask them what is the number one thing they are struggling with with automation. And based on their feedback based on that survey, I try to find sessions and speakers that help address the needs for the community that they're struggling with at that point in time. So all the sessions you get at in an automation guild is sessions that are delivered to address specific issues. Members have told me that they're struggling with this year that they need to know in order to be successful with their automation efforts. So it really is actionable automation advice that's going to help you with what you're struggling with with automation in the new year. So the first thing folks have told me they were struggling with is learning a language that is easy to pick up but yet very flexible, and that language was Python. So at this year's event, this is also a trend that I said is going to be bigger in 2020, using Python for automation. You can check that out in my previous episode, On Top of automation trends for 2020. But here's some sneak peek into two sessions we have that's going to help you, if you're a beginner to Python, get up to speed quickly with it and how to use it to start testing a REST service, or how to use the Python testing framework, PyTest. These are two awesome sessions you don't want to miss, especially geared towards beginners to help you get up to speed with your Python automation efforts. The first one is from the Automation Panda, Andrew Knight. Hello, everyone, I'm Andy Knight, but you might also know me as the Automation Panda. I'm really excited for 2020 and I'm especially excited here for Automation Guild 2020. So, as you may have heard, Python is hot right now. By all indicators, it's one of the most popular programming languages today. And so what I'd like to do today is teach y' all how to get started with Python for test automation, specifically using the Pytest framework. My talk will cover how to get started, how to set it up, we'll write some basic tests together and I'll conclude by sharing some resources for you how you can learn more. This talk is targeted primarily at those who either haven't used Python before or are new to the Pytest framework. So if you're ready, let's learn. And the next session is by Josh Grant, who works at Sauce Labs, so he probably gets a lot of key insights into what they're seeing on their end. And if Josh is back in Python, then I think it's a skill you should be learning and something you should be aware of in 2020. So you don't want to miss Josh's session as well at this year's Automation Guild. Let's check it out. So today I'm excited because I get to talk about Python and in particular we're going to be talking about Pytest and in, and specifically the awesome parts of pytest. I'm Josh Grant I'm a solution architect at Sauce Labs. So pytest is a really, really great test framework that provides functionality for testing at the unit API and end to end sort of browser app level.

And I just love Python, so I'm really just talking about Python today. So what does pytest provide specifically? So pytest specifically provides a test runner for executing tests in a really straightforward way that's highly configurable. So pytest provides lightweight utilities for, you know, testing different situations, but also allowing you to make use of Python conventions and coding in a lightweight way. And lastly, pytest provides a really great plugin ecosystem that provides helpful functionality for sort of higher level testing tasks or certain kind of complex situations that other people have faced in addition to like maybe what you're facing and so providing help from that community. So let's take a look and get started. Thank you Josh and Andrew for contributing to this year's Automation Guild with your Python awesomeness. Another challenge folks told me they were struggling with is actually finding out what they should be automating. One way to do this is to model. So we have an awesome session by Jim Hazen about modeling methods for automation and testing. Here's a quick peek at Jim's awesome session. Hi, I'm Jim Hazen and today we're going to talk about modeling methods for automation and testing. This presentation will cover information related to what is a model, what is a systems model modeling in the testing process and how we use it in general? What are the different modeling techniques used in software development, traditional and modern ones, and how they apply to software testing and automation? We will discuss the different types of models used in testing. Finally, we will talk about how to apply these models for automation and testing and thoughts regarding their pros and cons and tools that support their use. Thank you Jim for that. Also, another topic is continuous integration, continuous delivery, how to make sure that you are adding value throughout your pipeline. We have two sessions, one is by Eran Kinsbruner called Keeping your Continuous test automation Valuable continuously. And we also have a real world example how to get your whole team on board and be successful throughout the pipeline with Bagoya chatterjee from Sony PlayStation, which I thought was really cool. So two awesome sessions around CICD. Definitely want to check them out. Here's a quick peek with both of them. Hi everyone, my name is Aran Kinzwonner and I want to welcome you to the Automation Guild 2020. Hi everyone, my name is Aran Kinzoner and I want to welcome you to the Automation Guild 2020 and my session today is about keeping your continuous test automation valuable and continuously. And you understand later on in the session why continuously is the keyword here. Before I start talking about continuous testing, I would say discipline and best practices. This is just a high level comparison between different clouds across different geographies and also verticals that Perfecto has conducted over the past years to understand what actually causes inefficiencies, flakiness, lack of value from test automation investments. And what we have learned is that over 40% of the failures are due to scripts and frameworks issues. When I talk about scripts and framework issues, I talk about objects. Okay, am I using the right object ID or XPath? We hear it for so many years but still this is one of the most commonly reasons, if you like, for test flakiness, coding skills and coding skills. It's not just knowing how to Write Java or JavaScript. Writing Test automation code is materially different than writing production code for your features. Why? Because when you're writing test automation code, you need to take care of many, many environmental implications and dependencies. All right, thank you Iran. That's just a quick sample of Iran's session. If you want to find out actual advice that he gives on how to resolve a lot of the problems he sees every day at Perfecto Mobile, you don't want to miss that session. Hi everybody, my name is Bijoya Chatterjee. I am a Director of Software qa at Sony PlayStation. What I'm going to talk to you today is how at PlayStation we created a culture that shifted our mindset to be able to send out software releases every seven days instead of the software cycle that we had of three months or six months. Sending out software three or every three or six months. How we've shifted to a seven day release cycle using automation and continuous integration. I hope you find the topic interesting and I also hope that you are able to pick out some information from our conversation today and use that in your work or in your software release cycles to be able to achieve a shorter release cycle as well as gain more confidence in the product that you're sending out to your customers. Awesome. Thank you Pejoya. So some other sessions we have going on is one thing that folks told me they struggle with a lot is non UI automation. And I think it's an area where a lot of people neglect. They just focus all the efforts on UI automation and totally ignore API testing or other types of tests you can do under the covers of ui. So along those lines, so we have four sessions kind of around this type of thinking. Hello everyone and welcome to my talk on contract testing beyond API functional tests. I'm Gaurav Singh. I work as a test automation engineer in Gojek, Bangalore, India. So in this particular talk let's outline what are some of our learning goals. We are going to know what is consumer driven contract testing, what problems does it solve over integration tests, understand how it works, what are its pieces and its nuts and bolts. We are going to implement a contract test for a Twitter like API using a very popular tool in the market called AS pact. This tool is open source and can work with a variety of languages. But we are going to use jvm. In this particular talk, we are also going to understand when contract testing is not to be used. So we have got a lot to cover. Let's get started. Hey there, I'm Joo Farias from databug.com and today we're going to talk about tools. But before that I would like to invite you to look at some images what those images have in common. They are examples of illusions. Illusions in the usages of tools. They have illusions of effectiveness and security.

And the world of software testing is also full of this type of misuses, especially due to the lack of knowledge in alternative tools. In this presentation we walk through three problems in software testing and we will experiment with tools that are specialized in solving these problems. At the end of this presentation, we will have a broader knowledge of the tools that are available in the market and we'll be able to make wiser decisions in our projects. Hello, my name is Naomi Ferreira. I'm a computer scientist with more than 10 years experience. Between development and development in tests, multinationals and startups, a little bit of everything. And today I want to talk about things you didn't know you could automate. Now, you may know some of this stuff, but even if you do, please stay in the lien. Because first of all, I'm living the best for the end. And second, I hope that with this you get inspiration about other things, new things that you can do to automate in work and even at home to make things easier and faster for yourself. So I hope you like it. Let's get started. Hello there, My name is Satya. I'm a senior test automation engineer at SoFi. I've been doing test automation for more than 10 years now. Right now I'm primarily focused on mobile automation, but I have done API and web automation in the past too. I have spoken at several conferences about mobile automation and in particular about gray box testing or looking beneath the box to make UA tests more resilient. My most recent talk at Starburst had a companion blog post in TechBeacon and they talk about the test frameworks in various platforms that enable us to do gray box testing. In this talk I'm going to be more practical and actually show hands on code and do a walkthrough. But let's start with what I mean by a box. Thank you Gaura, Joe Nomi and also Sadie for showing us how to get beyond UI Selenium Automation to really expand our definition of what can be automated and how to automate it. Really great sessions you don't want to miss. So a few other things people said they were struggling with or they wanted to know more about. One was blockchain testing, another is on Big Data. So our session on Blockchain is by Rianne Lewis and she's going to go over how to test blockchain applications and what tools you can use to actually automate this type of technology. We also have one by Ali on Big Data 101 and the importance of Automation. I haven't received his session yet, so let's listen in to Rianne's session on blockchain testing. Hi, my name's Rhianne. I'd like to thank Joe very much for inviting me to talk about my favorite topic, which is blockchain applications and how to test them on Automation Guild. But before we start talking about how to test these things, first of all, what's a blockchain and why should we, as testing professionals, care about this at all? A lot of people still have this idea that this is very much a niche technology. Maybe they think of Bitcoin, maybe they think about all the overhyped projects that were around a couple of years ago. But the point is that behind the scenes, large companies and startups have been working away coming up with real use cases for this technology, which is now evidenced in quite a few projects which are in production or close to launch. We'll have a look at some of these use cases later. So in order to understand how to test these applications, we need to understand the properties that blockchains have that make them different from traditional applications, where you have a normal backend, which might be a database that belongs to one company that's sitting in the cloud, that only certain people have access to. So what is the difference between this and something that is built using distributed ledger technology, which is another word for a blockchain type structure? So we also have sessions around automation tools and techniques you can use to help you with the automation efforts in 2021 is by Jan Malik on Full Stack Acceptance testing with Serenity. We also have a session by Larry Goudad on Webdriver I.O. and also an interesting one from Angie Jones on Oxygen Ide. Also we have a session by Michelle on automated testing stability with Cloud Solutions. We have another one by Victoria Kosnikova on writing maintainable test code with Selenium and Spark and a few other tools. And also Rex Jones will be joining us on testng a powerful test framework. So let's listen into a few of these. As you can see I've checked out my code now in my favorite IDE intellij. This is the coding structure for.

Consists of a C index file of a runtime folder of a project folder config and a folder for browser stack of a circle CI. Now I decided to build this because of a situation where on work I had decided I needed to test a lot of stuff, both functional and I got some API testing going on and also had some visual regression to be done and the whole idea was to try and get everything in one. At least that's my concept, is to solve my unique little problem. So I decided instead of going with one with only boilerplates from webdriver IO, I decided to go and run webdriver IO as a standalone as a standard in standalone mode. So I build everything literally from scratch for it. Awesome. Thank you Larry. I really like Larry's session because it's a hands on session from someone that actually implemented a solution to help them with a specific problem in the real world. Really relatable awesomeness. So let's listen in now to Angie Jones's session on Oxygen ide. Hi, I'm Angie Jones. I'm an automation architect, senior developer Advocate at applitools and the Director of Test Automation University. In this talk, I'll demonstrate how to write automated tests using Oxygen, an integrated development environment for recording, developing and executing tests. Oxygen is developed by Cloudbeat and utilizes Selenium, WebDriver and Appium APIs. We'll write tests for automating, web, UI, mobile, visual testing, APIs, PDFs and emails. Let's jump right in. Hello, my name is Victoria and I work as a performance test engineer and test automation specialist in New Zealand. For the last six years or so I've mostly been in performance testing, but a year ago I changed companies and I got back into test automation and I haven't touched it for 10 years or so, so I was quite a bit behind. As you can imagine, tools and methods have evolved over the time, but I believe it also gave me a fresh set of eyes to look at it. So that was good. My first project was this big complex web application with multiple step processes, lots of backend systems behind it, complex test data and all that jazz. So it wasn't an easy get into it project. I inherited a few tools from my colleagues that were already doing test automation in the company, but I have changed how I'm using those tools a lot over the next few months as I was getting deeper and deeper into the project and struggling with this and those aspects of automating this testing of the big web application. So now I want to share my struggles and the solutions that I came across with you. And we don't have much time, so let's dig into it. Hey Joe, thanks for having me as one of your speakers for 2020 Automation Guild. Also, I want to thank everyone watching this video. I'm going to speak about Testng, a powerful test framework. Testng stands for Test Next Generation. It's a test framework that makes it easy to write test scripts, run test scripts and view test results. After executing the test scripts, we can perform all types of testing. The purpose is to track progress of an application under test aut. My goal is to share some test patterns that comes built into testng. I will show you and not just tell you how to achieve those test patterns. The plan is to demo how to install a testng. Next is annotations, then assertions. After assertions is data driven testing followed by dependency testing and parallel testing. And once again what I really like about these sessions is a lot of them are really hands on, actionable automation awesomeness. So you can see how other experts are succeeding in the real world with their solutions and their techniques and tools that you can definitely learn from and leverage yourself. Also have some awesome sessions on best practices like Taking Care of Business the Ugly Parts of Automation with Paul Grisaffi and we have some awesome end of day roundtables. Now listen to some of these names of experts that are going to be joining us for these roundtables. We have folks like Alan Richardson, the evil tester. We have Greg, Pascal, Karina, Pip, Nikolai from Ultimate qa. We have Tariq, King, Raghav, Paul and a bunch of other awesome expert speakers that you can ask them anything about automation to get insights into what they're seeing and how to be successful with all types of things that you might be struggling with. Now some other benefits of Automation Guild is that we have an awesome community in the Slack channel so that community lives on after the conference is over as well. So you have a year long resource to go to to ask automation questions throughout the year. Also, what's awesome about the online conference is it's very affordable and you get to interact with some of the biggest experts in the world live all online from the comfort of your home. And if for some reason you miss a session or miss a live Q and A, no worries. Everything is recorded and uploaded to the website. So it's almost like not only a conference but a membership site that you can go back to throughout the year, rewatch these sessions, download them locally and get year long automation awesomeness benefits from these sessions over and over again. And also you don't have to waste time with travel, taking time out of work, renting cars, getting food budgets, getting approval from your HR because it's so it's almost it's really a no brainer. And also our goal is always with all Automation Guild is you get actual automation awesomeness so that we have confidence in knowing that you're going to walk away with a tip, tool, technique or best practice that's going to help you transform your new or old automation efforts into great successes. So I think this is awesome value for you and your teams. If you haven't registered, I highly recommend you head on over to to either automationguild.com or go to guildconferences.com click on that register now button to learn more about the event. You only have one week from the release of this episode to register and get involved live with these awesome speakers. So the links to everything value we covered in this episode head on over to testguild.com a like automation289 and while you're there make sure to click on the Try it for Free Today link under the Exclusive Sign Sponsor section to learn all about Sauce Lab's awesome products and services. So that's it for this episode of the Test Guild Automation Podcast. I'm Joe and my mission is to help you succeed with creating end to end full stack automation awesomeness. As always, test everything and keep the good Cheers.