This Year's Must-Attend Automation Event..

Welcome to the Test Guild Automation Podcast where we all get together to learn.

More about automation and software testing with.

Your host, Joe Calantonio.

Hey, it's Joe. And welcome to another episode of the Test Guild Automation Podcast. And today it's going to be just you and me talking all about the upcoming 5th annual online conference dedicated 100% to automation testing Automation Guild. I'm going to share with you some of the reasons why I created this conference, as well as a sneak peek with some of the speaker sessions that will be with us at this year's event. And if you're listening to this on the day I release it, we're only two weeks away from this event, so if you haven't already, I highly recommend register today by heading over to automationguild.com and grab yourself a ticket. Usually my events the past three years for Automation Guild have been three day events focusing just on functional automation. But this year to celebrate the fifth annual online event, I decided to go back to our roots to the first time I did. The event was a five day event and I included all types of topics, not just functional automation. But I mixed them in throughout the week. I got some survey results saying that people wanted more just automation and didn't necessarily care about the other topics. So what I did this year is I created a five day event. So you have an option to buy a three day ticket and that three day ticket will just be for automation, functional automation, testing stuff, that's all you care about. And if it is all you care about, I think you should really expand your mind a little bit because I think that is going away in the future and you're going to need to know other types of automation. But that's besides the point. I've given you an option. You can get a ticket for the three day event or, or you can get a five day pass. And the five day pass includes both the first three days. The first three days will be once again dedicated to automation testing. That's the same event as the three day ticket, but you get two extra days so you get a fourth and fifth day. And on those days we're going to be covering all types of topics beyond just functional automation. So a lot of non functional automation topics like performance testing, security testing, accessibility testing, chaos engineering, we have a session on monitoring and to close out the day we're going to have a session on pipeline automation, which I think is the end goal of any type of Automation nowadays for DevOps, agile type software development teams. So it's really the theme of the whole event really, I guess, is automate your full pipeline. So when I say automation, I don't mean just functional automation. I mean any type of activity that you can automate to help your teams create software faster and with higher quality and it's going to save your team time. And that's what I mean by automation. And that's why I tried to cover in this particular event. So I want to share with you some of the speaker sessions and all the awesomeness that you're going to get with this event. You don't want to miss this episode. Check it out.

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All right, so if this is the first time you're hearing about Automation Guild, I just want to give you a little background of what is Automation Guild so you know what the heck I'm even talking about before we get into a sneak peek to some of the speaker sessions. So I created Automation Guild in 2017, the first one I ran in January of 2017, and at that time, before all this COVID 19 hit, I saw hardly anyone having online events dedicated just to automation testing. I believe I was actually one of the first ones, if not the very first, to have a online event dedicated just to automation testing and tooling, not like high level testing and agile and all that stuff. That's great. But this is more like toolsmithing, getting your hands dirty type of automation event. I think it was one of the first ever. Just the reason why I say that is, you know, we started as an online event company and will always be just an online event company. I think you see a lot of companies now just scrambling to put on online events. They're just making, they're just doing it just to get by. But it's not necessarily something that they specialize in or that they really believe in. And everyone's talking about, oh well, once we get back to normal, we'll go back to on site events. I created this whole thing because I don't like on site events because I'm an introvert and you know, it's just, I find it. You spend a lot of time traveling, spending a lot of money and I think an online event is a better experience in my experience. So just put it out there. That's what I think. And that's why one of the main reasons why I created Automation Guild and I think that's why we have a lot of repeat attendees over the past five years. So I'm really proud about that. We have a really great app active community in a private Slack Channel. So if you were to join this event, you get access to the Automation Guild Slack Channel where you'll be able to interact with everyone that attended this event and all previous events. So you have support before, during and long after this event is over. So not only is it a conference, it's not one and done. It's almost like a membership site as well, because you get access to all these recordings within a membership site, so you can review anytime, any place, anytime you want, forever. So you have forever access and you have forever access to that Slack Channel. We have a really good active community that can help and support you along the way. So I really think why experiment with automation when you can really fast track your time to success? So I really designed this event also to be actionable. So I've only asked speakers that will present actionable automation tips, tools, techniques, effects and practices that you can put into place right away to help you with a new or an existing automation project to really get you up and running fast. And not only fast, but set up correctly so you avoid some of the speed bumps that other people had to go through. So a lot of best practices are shared that really are going to accelerate your particular effort as well. And it also allows you to improve your professional development at a really low cost. It's a great way for you to get up to speed on all the latest and greatest. So I really recommend you always attend the annual event because it really will get you jump started for the new year and give you insights just by speaking to other people in the Slack channel or by hearing some of our other speakers of what they see the future is heading and maybe sharing a tool or technique you didn't know about that really is going to help you become more valuable to your company. I really believe that this is another benefit as well and you can watch these sessions live. So what's going to happen is I have all the speakers prerecord just their session. So the reason why I do that is if they want to dive deep into code, they can. And we're assured that during the event there aren't going to be any hiccups. So what I do is I stream their session, prerecorded session, and then I bring the speaker in for Live Q and A. So you get the best of both worlds. You get a highly polished session followed by the actual author of that session that you can then ask them any questions. So a lot of these people are high paid automation consultants that you would have to pay a lot of money to ask them questions around what they're doing. This way, when you join this event, you get that as part of your ticket. So it's another big perk I think you get from this particular event as well. And if you're like me, you're an introvert, you're a little shy. I think the soundline experience is better because you don't have to stand up, hold a mic in front of a whole crowd of people to ask your question. It's a lot easier to ask your question without feeling like you're put on the spot. So that's definitely another benefit as I see it. And because the whole event is being recorded, I know it's a long time commitment. It's five days or if you have a three day, it's a three day ticket. If for some reason you missed any of the sessions, everything will be recorded and uploaded to the membership site so you'll be able to watch and view later. And if you know you're going to miss a session, you can always submit a question ahead of time so that I can ask your question while we're live so that you won't miss out on that as well. And over the years, I've just found that our Slack channel is very, very active during the event and there's a lot of networking going on. A lot of people are meeting each other and supporting each other throughout. Like I said, it's been over almost five years now since we started and we have people that have been in there since 2017 still there to this day getting value. So I highly recommend that you check that out as a benefit as well when you join this event. And this year I think the community is going to be even better because we're going to have Tristan Lombard, a customer advocate and community builder. You probably know him, he works at Testim, he used to work at Sauce Labs. Really, really great guy. And he really knows community, how to get people interact with one another. So I think this year is going to be off the hook with Tristan helping lead the way for this fifth annual event. All right, so I think I've given you a little idea of why I created this event and why I think it's important. If you haven't heard of it before now, I Just want to share with you. The theme for this event is kind of coming together as a automate your pipeline. So I don't know if you read my blog. I have a blog as well at Test Guild, but I always release every year since 2015, I think, or 16. My top trends for the new year and one of the top trends I've been seeing is not just automation, like functional script automation, but there's a need for someone that is more high level, that can automate the full pipeline or at least shepherd their teams into what they need to do in order to automate everything within their pipeline as the developing software. So it's not just your functional automation. How can we shift left other activities like how can we get security in there, how can we get performance testing? There's been a big demand more for accessibility testing I've been hearing a lot about. So I got speakers that could talk on all these topics as well. And that's why I created this particular lineup for this particular event. So we have over 38 speakers at this year's event. And another benefit of this event, I think it's a benefit is a single track event. So usually when you go to conferences you have to choose between like five different conferences. And you know, if you have a session you want to see, but you have Angie Jones on the main stage at the same time, you kind of, it's hard to choose right at that point. So this way it's just single track so you don't have to worry about missing out on another session because there's another session going on at the same time. So I want to share with you some of the sessions. There's so many of them, I can't share them with them in the amount of time on this podcast. So I highly recommend you go to automationguild.com, check out our lineup. We have a bunch of folks. We have Simon Stewart going over using Selenium Foreign Anger. Simon is the Selenium Webdriver creator. We have Jonathan Lips joining us who is one of the lead contributors to Appium. He's going to give a sneak peek to the first time you're probably going to see or hear about Appium 2.0. We have a bunch of roundtables. We have one roundtable that's featuring some of the top Selenium contributors. So folks like Jim Evans, David Burns, Diego Molina, you can ask them any type of question around Selenium where they see the future of Selenium, any tips or tricks you may need. And we're also going to have a roundtable on other frameworks that aren't Selenium. So this isn't a session on frameworks that are better than Selenium.

I've gotten a lot of questions in my survey about other frameworks, so I thought it'd be a great idea to have a roundtable just for those frameworks as well. So we have folks like Angie Jones joining us. She's going to be representing Playwright. We have Philipp Hettick who is going to be representing Cypress. He's a Cypress ambassador. We have Dmytro, who is a author of Modern Testing with Test Cafe, that's to be representing Test Cafe. We have Pekka Clark, who is the creator of Robot Framework that I think is going to be joining us. We're also probably going to have someone from UFT that's going to talk about uft. So it's just going to give you an opportunity to ask questions about like, hey, what's the difference between this framework and that framework? And when would one framework be better for my team compared to the other? Not necessarily which framework is better among them all, but which framework is best for you and your unique needs. So, as I said, there's a lot of folks speaking, so definitely check it out@automationguild.com but here's a few of the speakers just to give you a taste for what you're going to get when you purchase and register a ticket today. If you haven't Already, register now. AutomationGuild.com first up, we have Iran Kinsbruner. Iran has been with us since the beginning. I think he's been in every single automation guild. This would be his fifth appearance and Iran is one of the thought leaders in the space around automation. Special Mobile automation really has a pulse on it. In my survey I always get people ask me they want more sessions around mobile testing. And here's Aran speaking about what he's going to cover in his session at this year's event.

Hi everyone, my name is Aaron Kinzmuner and I'm truly excited to take part again in the fifth annual online event Automation Guild from Joco Antonio. And in today's session I'm going to focus on the key mobile app trends and what they mean for developers and testers. What you need to know actually when you're diving deep into 2021 and beyond. I wanted to open this session part to diving into the mobile trends because I think that putting aside the mobile innovation which is happening, we cannot really ignore what's happening in the DevOps landscape with AI and machine learning and other intelligent technologies that are becoming or invading these DevOps processes pipelines and aiming to improve to put more efficiency expedite processes and basically making our lives much more easy. So while I'm going to focus in this session on mobile trends, I just wanted to put this in front of you because obviously you are aware you are hearing about that. So this is not a trend and machine learning is a reality and this is what going to shape the entire DevOps activities from code creation to quality production monitoring, observability logs, predictability of things that are happening throughout the entire product lifecycle and many more. Let's dive in into what you want and in my mind also need to know as you are learning and practitioning the mobile space both as a developer and a tester.

Thank you Aran once again for participating in this year's event. And as Aran mentioned, I highly agree with him that in DevOps is really going to be a shift in new technologies that are going to help with automation. And we actually have other sessions at this event as well to help you with that. For example, we have a session by Tariq King and Tariq is going to be going over AI for game testing that shows the power of AI using it to test games. We also have a session by Shani Shaham on modern test automation and his tool is like a unique kind of mobile AI machine learning type of tool. You have to see it in action to actually understand it. But it's one of those type of technologies I think you're going to see and need to know more about. So just thank you Iran for bringing that up because we definitely have sessions covering that as well. We also have a session from Buzz and Buzz is a automation engineer and he's sharing his real world experience working on a test focus software development project. Let's check that out.

Hey Automation Guild 2021 my name is Bas Dijkstra and I'm a test automation trainer and consultant living in the Netherlands. What I normally do is I help teams and organizations take their first or the next step in automation. But in the past year I went on a little adventure as a software developer and in this session I would like to share these experiences. I would like to share what I've learned with you. This year marks 15 years of me working in the test automation field, but I've never really worked as a full fledged, full blown software developer until last year. Last year I was contacted by the fine folks at Test Project and they asked me. We've been collaborating for a while, mostly through me, writing blog posts and articles for their website, and they asked me if I was interested to help them develop a new product for them.

Thank you Boz for that awesome insight. So another topic I want to cover at this year's event is API testing. We also have a session on microservices, which I think is a growing trend. We also have a session from Julia on next level API automation, testing the boundaries of your automation. Let's listen into her session.

Hi, my name is Julia Pottinger, Training and development manager at QualityWorks Consulting Group. Today we're going to talk about automating the boundaries of your APIs. Normally when we're doing automation for APIs, we only check positive scenarios and ensure that we get back a valid response. However, we need to go much further than that. We need to ensure that it returns the correct error messages and it does not allow for unauthorized access if a correct token or authorization code is not provided. We also need to ensure that it matches the speed schema for the response that is being returned. Additionally, we need to check workflows for APIs and these are scenarios where you're going to create a user, then you're going to do a get request to verify that the user was created and then you want to do some update or you may even want to delete the user. These chain requests are very important and today we're going to talk about three of those boundaries that you can test when doing API automation. Let's get started.

Thank you Julia. And we also have another session on leveraging your REST API functional test for performance testing. This is a really actionable hands on session when you actually get to see code in action.

Today's topic is about the REST issued tool. So we'll be covering two topics in detail. The first one would be adding curl request and response in the LIOR report while running the API automated test cases. So we'll start with this. Now I'll be opening the IntelliJ. So this would be more a hands on coding, not merely a talking session. So yeah, so starting with the project, I'll start with the framework, the basic framework that I've created. So, so here you can see all the files that are available. So this is the base UTIL API, which is parent class for all the test classes.

Thank you Navpreet for that. We also have Leandro Melendez, my amigo, the senior performer. You probably know him from performance testing. But what Leandro is presenting is automating The Automatic Automation. So it's kind of a crazy title but it goes over all the different types of automation and this I think really encompasses the spirit, I think of this year's event on how to automate your pipelines. Here's Leonzhou explaining it better on what he's going to be covering at this year's event.

Hello and welcome to this Test Automation Guild presentation that we are so happy to start and present for you on this new 2021.

Let me introduce Today we are going to talk about automatic automations being automated automatically and everything that goes around, how to streamline pipeline or whichever you want to call it, ways to automate whatever is already automated. We're going to go into some details but let's jump into the topic which is automations automating them, making that automatic and everything out of something. But before we dive into that and of course we're going to be talking mostly about test automations but we need to define what is an automation and mostly. Well, I went, as you could see, to Technopedia and grabbed the official definition of what is an automation is the creation and application of technologies to produce and deliver good services with minimal human intervention. Intervention. This is one that I want to for you to land on your skulls. Minimal human intervention, that's super important. And automation technologies help to process improve the efficiency, reliability, speed of the tasks that again were previously done by humans but where machines are better to do definitely than us.

So also on my survey that I mentioned earlier, I got a lot of questions around BDD and playwright. So playwright is a big trend. So I was really excited about when I got this session proposed to me by Sanjay. It is on not only BDD but it is actually on setting the stage for playwright and cucumber js. So you're gonna get the best of both worlds. We also have, we also have Seb Rose is one of the main contributors to Cucumber. He's gonna be covering RBDD and test automation the same thing. And we have another session around BDD with George Yukora on behavior driven non functional testing and performance security testing. So BDD will be represented really well at this event. Definitely. Check it out. Head on over to automationguild.com, register today. But first let's listen once again into Sanjay session on what she'll be covering.

Welcome to Automation Guild 2021. And this session which is setting the stage with playwright and cucumber is playwright and cucumber are important testing tools and I think we've got lots to learn a little bit about me. I'm a testing professional from Minneapolis, Minnesota. I've been testing since 2006. Most recently I was at Clockwork and before that Destineer, made lots of video games, worked on lots of reward systems and many different web applications. In the past year I've been focusing on getting back to quality, working with progressive web applications at cloudburst. We are working in the healthcare space, the railroad space and all sorts of other areas and it's been exciting, it's been fast, and Playwright has definitely been a tool that's helped me move forward. So I'd like to share that knowledge today. Let's jump in.

So speaking of Playwright, I get a lot of questions on the survey like what is the difference between this framework and that framework and how do I decide what's best for my team? And so once again I was really excited to get a session submitted. This one was from Stephen Kilbourne and he's going over deciding when to pick Cypress versus WebDriver, but he also gives a framework for what he uses at his large company to decide what tools they should use for the different clients that they work with.

Hi, my name is Steven Kilbourne. I am a quality engineer at Dialexa. Dialectsa is the technology, research, design and creation firm. That means we partner with clients ranging from smaller startups to large enterprise corporations that have some sort of problem and we help them understand that problem and design and build a solution for it. That means we are working with a lot of different technologies ranging from bleeding edge things to interfacing with decades old mainframes. My role as a quality engineer is to understand what we're actually working with and building and also to understand the organizational structure of who will be taking over, maintaining and building this product once we leave.

As a quality engineer I take that knowledge and put together some processes and possibly some tooling for them to build a quality product and keep maintaining it. A lot of times I need to build a end to end testing suite. So today we are going to jump through the process of deciding between two end to end testing frameworks, particularly ones that are built in JavaScript.

We also have Marie Drake joining us who will be covering Cypress, but not just Cypress, actually using Cypress with performance testing. So you're able to leverage your Cypress automation and also get performance benefits by hooking in to Google Lighthouse.

Hi everyone, my name is Marie Drake. I'm a software tester and a Cypress ambassador. I'm also a tech blogger@mariedrake.com and also the co organizer of the Cypress UK community meetup group. I would like to welcome you all to my first Automation Guild session which is about performance testing using Cypress and Google Lighthouse. So in today's session I'll give you an overview as to why you should care about your application's performance. Next I'll talk about performance testing and how you can use Google Lighthouse, a free and open source tool that you can use to test the performance of your websites. And finally I'll jump straight ahead to the hands on session of setting up Cypress Audit, a plugin that you can use to extend Cypress so you can easily run web performance tests and track your Google Lighthouse score.

Another thing that automation engineers struggle with all the time is how to manage their test data. So we have a session covering that as well. Let's listen in. Hello everyone, my name is Mark Winteringham.

And welcome to my talk look at the state of your automation in which.

We'Re going to be exploring different techniques.

And different approaches to managing state managing data for your automated checks and we're.

Going to look at the pros and cons of each approach and hopefully get you to a point in which you can find the right approach that works.

For you based on your context.

So let's get started. Thank you Mark and as I mentioned, I've been hearing a lot, a lot about accessibility testing last year and I think it's something that we all need to know about, especially as we move forward in 2021 and beyond. So we have a session on how to automate accessibility testing. Check it out.

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 Pragati 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 in my entire tenure I have had the chance and the opportunity to work on different facets and different types of testing and automation. So I've done web automation, I have done web services automation, be it REST, APIs, GraphQL and then non functional automation as well that comprises of performance and off late accessibility.

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 another topic that's always near and dear to my heart is performance testing. And we have Stephen that's going to be covering how to create performance frameworks.

Hi there, my name is Steven Townsend. I am a performance specialist based in New Zealand and I work for an insurance company called iag which is Australian based. And the role that I currently have is that I am a performance test lead in a large program of work.

Today I'm going to talk about the benefits of building your own load testing framework with some examples of what that might look like, things that you could build, as well as specific examples of things that we've built at iag. I also want to explore some of the guiding principles around frameworks and how to do them the most effectively.

Now, historically at IAG there has been multiple performance testing teams. Recently, three of those teams merged together into one from different cities and that's the team that I'm in now. Now, my colleagues in Melbourne, which is in Australia, built an open source load testing framework called Mark 5.9 which is available on GitHub. This is a fully featured load testing framework in New Zealand. We hadn't built anything quite as mature, but we had built some tools and some processes and some sort of mini frameworks along the way. And when we compared MK59 and the tools and frameworks that we had built, I found that we were often solving the same kinds of problems, sometimes even covering exactly the same functionality. And that was interesting for me. It got me thinking about the role of frameworks in the work of a performance tester.

And we also are going to have a session on monitoring. I think monitoring is really an overlooked piece that people always overlook. That is an easy win to integrate with your existing automation tests. We have a session by Simon who actually shows how you can do this with the existing robot framework, but you could probably learn principles of how to do this with any other automation framework. So let's see what Simon's all about.

Hi, my name is Simon Meckle. I'm an independent IT consultant in the south of Germany, near Munich. My main focus is on IT infrastructure, monitoring, data center automation and end to end testing. I'm very happy to be a speaker at this conference. Thanks to Joe for inviting me and I hope you enjoy my presentation. I think some of you are familiar with Robot Framework, but probably most of you not with Jackmk and for sure nobody with Robot mk. My goal is to show you now how you can integrate the results of Robot Framework into the open Source monitoring tool CheckMK with Robert MK let's get started.

So there are a lot of other sessions that we're covering at this year's event. I didn't have time to cover them all and I also haven't received all the speaker session yet. But we have two weeks away. Time is running out on getting your ticket for this year's event. Hopefully you're convinced you're all psyched now if you listen all the way to the end to do yourself a favor and your team by grabbing yourself a ticket to this year's event, head on over to automationguild.com register today so if you look at everything of value we covered in today's episode, head on over to test guild.com a337 and while you're there, make sure to click on the Try for Free Today link under the Exclusive Sponsor section to learn all about Sauce Labs 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. Thanks for listening to the Test Guild Automation Podcast. Head on over to testguild.com for full show notes, amazing blog articles and online testing conferences. Don't forget to subscribe to the Guild to continue your test.