June 2020 Summaries

Breakpoint 2020 is a virtual summit on testing featuring speakers from top dev and QA teams discussing building quality assurance processes, automating at scale, and best practices for success with tools and frameworks. Alexandra Schladebeck, CEO and Head of Quality at Bredex GmbH, shares her experience in the field and how she got into testing. Her role at Bredex involves developing strategies to prepare for future customer quality challenges, coaching and mentoring others, and promoting quality topics at conferences. In her session for Breakpoint 2020, Schladebeck will discuss a holistic approach to quality, emphasizing the responsibility of everyone in a team for product, process, and human interaction quality. For those looking to change careers to testing, she advises continuous learning through community involvement and participation in events like conferences.

Breakpoint 2020 is a virtual summit featuring speakers from top dev and QA teams discussing testing strategies. Benjamin Bischoff, Test Automation Engineer at trivago, will be presenting about the company's journey towards efficient continuous delivery of its main product. He will discuss how they overcame initial challenges with test automation and where they are heading now. Bischoff is also the author and maintainer of two open source projects for Cucumber BDD parallel test execution and reporting, Cucable and Cluecumber. Currently, he is working on a new version of Cluecumber to replace the JSON format. Apart from his work in testing, Bischoff enjoys learning about close-up magic. His advice for those new to testing is to stay curious, ask questions, and keep learning.

David Fahlander is the creator of Dexie.js, an open source tool that enables web apps to store data in browsers instead of servers. This allows web apps to function even when internet connectivity is down. The project was launched in 2014 and has since gained popularity among developers. Fahlander found contributors for Dexie.js by promoting the library through articles, blog posts, and social media platforms. He also received contributions from users who discovered bugs or limitations that could be fixed or worked around in the library. Some of Fahlander's favorite development tools include Visual Studio Code, jsfiddle.net, and stackblitz.com. These tools help him stay productive and allow for efficient coding and testing. Fahlander's passion for APIs and software is fueled by the love he receives from users in the form of contributions, messages, and emails. He plans to build a product that complements Dexie.js under a freemium model to sustain his work on the project. Testing plays an important role in maintaining the stability and reliability of Dexie.js. Fahlander uses automated tests to verify long-lived specifications and avoid tying up the code, making it harder to refactor later. Fahlander's preferred method for networking is through GitHub issues and occasionally on Twitter and Mastodon. He also plans to write posts on Medium in the future.

Breakpoint 2020 is a free, four-day virtual summit taking place from July 20-23. The event will feature presentations from renowned dev and QA teams such as Twitter, Selenium, The Weather Channel, Trivago, Robot Framework, and more. Key themes include building up quality assurance (QA) automation at scale, tools of the trade for testing, and transitioning from manual to automated testing. Attendees will learn about writing test scripts, continuous delivery pipelines, and establishing clear ownership of QA processes. The summit will also cover how teams with large user bases automate testing at scale and maintain high test coverage while releasing multiple times a day without compromising quality. Additionally, participants can explore demos and best practices for popular tools and frameworks from their creators and maintainers.

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced people to work from home and spend more time online, leading to a surge in software usage. This has been an opportunity for businesses that have transitioned to digital, with telemedicine seeing 6X higher impression volume than before the lockdowns, mobile e-commerce ad spend up 34%, mobile news consumption up 11x, and app installs increasing by 5% on Google Play and 15% on the iOS App Store. Software companies have seen their shares prove more resilient than the overall stock market during this time. The pandemic has highlighted the importance of delivering quality software, which requires continuous, automated testing. Some best practices for automated testing include finding and fixing flaky tests, shortening review cycles by doing a bulk of testing before code review, using device-level retries to avoid full test build restarts, adopting a risk-based approach to testing, informing feedback loops with data, and maintaining production sanity.

SpeedLab is a free tool that allows users to test website speed across multiple browsers and devices. With the increasing number of device types and browser options, developers face challenges in ensuring optimal user experiences. Traditional website speed tests do not account for variations in browser engines or device CPUs. SpeedLab addresses this issue by testing website speed on various browser-device combinations, providing insights into end-user experiences and a cumulative score of the website's speed across multiple devices. Additionally, users can debug issues using BrowserStack Live.

In this webinar, David Burns discusses the importance of continuous testing and parallelization for speeding up software releases. He explains how to get started with parallelization for test automation and answers questions about driver instantiation, parallel execution, frameworks, and best practices. Key considerations in parallel testing include running tests independently from a known state, maintaining parallel execution throughout the development cycle, balancing browser instantiation and cleaning, avoiding disk interactions, using appropriate automation frameworks like jUnit or TestNG for Java, handling mocked APIs, and ensuring good reporting with test runners.