July 2020 Summaries

Breakpoint 2020 is a virtual summit on testing featuring speakers from top dev and QA teams discussing building QA processes, automating at scale, and best practices for success with tools and frameworks. Mike Fotinakis, co-founder of Percy (recently acquired by BrowserStack), will be speaking about visual testing and review platform, Percy. The platform was built to make visual testing easy for anyone and has evolved from catching visual bugs to helping developers have confidence in every visual change. With the acquisition by BrowserStack, Percy is now part of a comprehensive testing experience for users.

Breakpoint 2020 is a virtual summit on testing featuring speakers from top dev and QA teams discussing building QA processes, automating at scale, and best practices for success with tools and frameworks. Pekka Klärck, the creator of Robot Framework, an open-source test automation framework, shares how he developed the idea based on his Master's thesis and experiences in developing test automation frameworks. Since 2008, Robot Framework has evolved significantly with improvements to syntax, logs, reports, extension APIs, and a growing community. In his session for Breakpoint 2020, Klärck will cover the basics of using the framework, creating high-level domain-specific keywords, and the library API. He is currently learning about rope splicing but plans to resume tech learning after the holiday season. For those new to testing, he recommends understanding your domain well, learning both exploratory testing and test automation basics, and considering Python for programming. Klärck has been focusing on upcoming Robot Framework releases and hasn't worked on any side-projects recently.

Breakpoint 2020 is a virtual summit on testing featuring speakers from top dev and QA teams discussing building QA processes, automating at scale, and best practices for success with tools and frameworks. Alan Richardson, also known as 'Evil Tester,' consults, coaches, and mentors teams to improve their testing and software development quality. He advocates 'evil testing,' a blend of skill, attitude, and pragmatism that challenges assumptions and encourages pushing boundaries in testing. In his session for Breakpoint 2020, Richardson will discuss thinking differently about automated testing, using real-world examples to illustrate his points. He has authored three books: 'Java For Testers,' 'Automating and Testing a REST API,' and 'Dear Evil Tester.' Currently, he is working on a model-based REST API generator called "The Thingifier." Richardson advises new testers to get hands-on experience, take notes, learn from various resources, and practice regularly.

Breakpoint 2020 is a four-day virtual summit on testing featuring speakers from top dev and QA teams discussing building QA processes, automating at scale, and best practices for success with tools and frameworks. Lawrence Mandel, Director of Production Engineering, Developer Acceleration at Shopify, will be speaking about taking stronger technical opinions to promote innovation through advanced tooling and automation. In his role at Shopify, Mandel leads the Developer Acceleration team which focuses on making commerce developers highly productive by scaling Shopify engineering. He is also interested in leadership, strategy, planning, people management, and mentorship. Mandel's session will cover taking stronger technical opinions to reduce decision-making and promote innovation with more advanced tooling and automation. In his view, a leader's role is not to make every decision but rather to ensure that every decision is made by listening to others and being willing to change one's opinion based on new information. Mandel is currently reading about 'Antifragility,' which explores the concept of something becoming better when broken, as opposed to fragile things that get worse when broken.

Breakpoint 2020 is a four-day virtual summit on testing featuring speakers from top dev and QA teams discussing building QA processes, automating at scale, and best practices for success with tools and frameworks. Abesh Rajasekharan, Technology Senior Manager at Thomson Reuters, will speak about the build vs. buy dilemma in the context of BrowserStack. In his role at Thomson Reuters, Abesh leads DevOps and Automation teams for their Checkpoint Product, focusing on reducing time to market, redesigning architecture, and leveraging cloud services. He is currently working on a project consolidating dev team dashboards using Angular-based UI with .NET core backend. His current learning focus is .NET Core 3.x, and he advises new testers to think like developers, keep learning languages and frameworks, and not restrict themselves to one language or framework.

Breakpoint 2020 is a four-day virtual summit on testing featuring speakers from top dev and QA teams discussing building QA processes, automating at scale, and best practices for success with tools and frameworks. Omose Ogala, Software Engineer in Test at Twitter, will speak about testing for a product with microservice architecture, including the challenges faced and how they were overcome. Omose's interest in testing began during an internship where he wrote user acceptance tests for an internal Dell website. He has since developed multiple iOS apps under the #OgalaApps label, including Vizzi Music, Schmoney Game, and a music identification app for parties. His recent side-project is Stream Party, a Google Chrome extension that enables synced video streaming with friends along with chat and messaging features. Currently, Omose is learning SwiftUI to stay updated on the latest mobile development technologies. For those new to testing, he advises asking plenty of questions, being open to learning new tools and techniques, and understanding the basics of why and how we test.

Breakpoint 2020 is a four-day virtual summit on testing with speakers from top dev and QA teams discussing building QA processes, automating at scale, and best practices for success. Crystal Preston-Watson, Quality and Accessibility Engineer at Salesforce, will be speaking about accessibility as an ongoing initiative, integrating accessibility testing into workflows, and post-accessibility audits. She transitioned from front-end development to quality assurance after finding that it didn't completely satisfy her passion for working in journalism. At Salesforce, she leads support and testing of accessibility issues on products and guides the testing and development of features for accessibility compliance. Her interest in accessibility testing began when she was asked to test a feature using JAWS, a screen-reader for Windows. She emphasizes that accessibility is a human right and encourages new testers to be interested in their work and take care of themselves physically.

BrowserStack, the leading web and mobile application testing platform, has acquired Percy, the world's top visual testing and review platform. Percy automates visual testing by capturing screenshots, comparing them against a baseline, and highlighting any visual changes. Many modern agile teams, including those at Basecamp, Canva, and Shopify, rely on Percy for pixel-perfect UI with each release. With this acquisition, developers and QA teams can now run visual tests alongside manual and automated functional tests using BrowserStack's infrastructure to ship high-quality software quickly. The integration of Percy into the BrowserStack platform is already available for users.

Breakpoint 2020 is a four-day virtual summit featuring speakers from top dev and QA teams discussing testing strategies, automation at scale, and best practices for success using tools and frameworks. Priyanka Halder, Senior Manager of Quality Engineering at GoodRx, will be presenting on Modern Automation Approaches, including A/B testing, feature flagging, mobile testing debugging capabilities, accessibility ID parity, dynamic capability generators, and how to integrate them into a project efficiently. She will also discuss leveraging various tools and frameworks for modern approaches. As a Tech Mom, Halder finds balance between her motherly duties and leadership role in technology while sharing experiences with fellow tech moms of the industry. Her first public speaking assignment was at Wonder Women in Tech Nov 2018, where she shared her journey from computer science to leading a department at GoodRx. She has since spoken at over 12 national and international conferences. Halder is also volunteering as a quality advisor for multiple small companies in Los Angeles and serving as Conference Chair for CONTEST NYC amidst COVID-19 challenges. Currently, she's reading 'Inspired' by Marty Cagan and following tech blogs to stay updated on industry trends and tools. For someone new to testing, Halder recommends understanding what excites them about the field, setting achievable goals, following influencers on Twitter, focusing on mastering one area of interest before moving on, and staying nimble as the industry evolves.

Breakpoint 2020 is a virtual summit focusing on testing and bringing speakers from top dev and QA teams to discuss building QA processes, automating at scale, and best practices for success with tools and frameworks. Brian Lucas, Senior Staff Engineer at Optimizely, will be speaking about "How to win in software development with tighter feedback loops." His session will focus on improving velocity on build and test processes by concentrating on feedback loops. He holds four patents related to video streaming and an offer system for financial marketplaces. Currently, he is reading "Accelerate State of DevOps" from DORA and exploring the concept of Hexagonal Architecture popularized by Netflix. His advice to someone new to testing is that every engineer should know how to test across multiple domains (unit/integration/end-to-end) to avoid losing vital context and not covering all necessary scenarios, including edge cases.

Breakpoint 2020 is a virtual summit on testing featuring speakers from top dev and QA teams discussing building QA processes, automating at scale, and best practices for success with tools and frameworks. David Burns, core contributor to Selenium, Chairperson for the W3C Browser Testing and Tools Working Group, and Engineering Manager at BrowserStack, shares his journey into becoming a core contributor to Selenium by contributing documentation, fixing .NET bindings, rewriting python bindings, and working with Mozilla. As Chairperson for the W3C Browser Testing and Tools Working Group, David focuses on coordination and facilitation, currently working on a new transport protocol. In his session at Breakpoint 2020, he will discuss the future of Selenium, its new features, and how they impact standards processes. David has authored multiple books to help people get started with Selenium and believes in maintaining a good work-life balance by working on simpler side projects not related to computers. For someone new to testing, he advises communicating their value to leadership teams as testers play a vital role in making technical problems human-readable.

Twitter uses continuous testing to ensure its website functions properly across various platforms and browsers. They have thousands of unit tests and nearly a hundred integration tests, which are automated to reduce the need for manual QA efforts. The company uses Webdriver framework with Selenium tests written in JavaScript and BrowserStack for remote testing environments. To mitigate challenges related to test flakiness, Twitter implemented device-level retries and developed a visual tool called Test Dashboard to display success/failure rates over time. This robust testing infrastructure allows developers to focus on writing new code instead of ensuring the tests pass.

Breakpoint 2020 is a four-day virtual summit on testing featuring speakers from top dev and QA teams discussing building QA processes, automating at scale, and best practices for success with tools and frameworks. Todd Eaton, Head of DevOps at The Weather Company and speaker at Breakpoint 2020, leads the IBM Watson Media and Weather B2C Dev-Ops and Web-QA teams responsible for system administration, testing, and deployment of applications like weather.com, wunderground.com, and The Weather Channel apps. In his session for Breakpoint 2020, Eaton will describe how their B2C web team has shifted from relying on QA tests for assertions to more visual regression and end-to-end testing. As a STEM Academy Advisory Board Member, Eaton shares real-world examples of STEM careers with students and influences curriculum with technology and industry trends. He is currently working on security compliance for B2C products and recently finished reading 'Accelerate — Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations' by Nicole Forsgren PhD, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim. Eaton advises new testers to dedicate four hours a week to learning new skills in areas such as test automation, build and deployment automation, environment orchestration, security, and other compliance management.