January 2020 Summaries

Hilary Weaver-Robb, a software quality architect at Quicken Loans, is a speaker at SauceCon 2020. She specializes in API testing and C# automation, and has over 12 years of experience in software testing. Hilary will share her expertise on how the UI and API work together during her talk at SauceCon 2020, providing attendees with a better understanding of troubleshooting issues from the UI and a more complete picture of the application under test. She is also active in training people on API testing and testing tools, and runs a meetup group for software testers in Detroit.

To improve testing efficiency by creating atomic tests that bypass unnecessary steps, developers can use Javascript injection to set an application state. This allows for the creation of a base page object and extraction of duplicated code, enabling more focused and efficient testing.

Distributed tracing is a technique used to track requests as they traverse the distributed components of an application, helping QA teams identify failures, performance issues, and areas for optimization. It provides end-to-end visibility into application performance, enabling developers and operations teams to pinpoint issues, analyze user experience, and make data-driven decisions. By incorporating tracing into their development cycle, QA teams can verify that data and workflows behave as designed, detect unintended dependencies, and identify root causes of issues quickly and efficiently. Distributed tracing also helps ensure sensitive information is kept private and provides a framework for measuring and visualizing tracing to derive value from it. Its application extends beyond microservices to other software components, enabling developers and QA teams to debug faster and more effectively with distributed tracing applied to real devices and browsers.

Hélène Doumenc and Jonathan Chacón, colleagues at Cabify, are working together to make digital interfaces accessible to everyone, not just those with disabilities. As a blind researcher and developer, Jonathan is uniquely qualified to lead this effort. They will be co-presenting at SauceCon 2020 about their experience in accessibility testing for mobile applications, highlighting the importance of making technology more inclusive to create a society that levels the playing field for people with disabilities. Their goal is to raise awareness and make the community conscious about issues that might not cross your mind but are truly important to create inclusion.

In this Tech Talk, Nikolay Advolokin discusses the importance of atomic tests in automated testing, explaining that an atomic test is a single item being tested, such as a feature or function, to validate its functionality. Having many atomic tests is beneficial for fast test execution and successful test automation, as it allows for quicker identification of issues and reduces duplication. Nikolay highlights the benefits of avoiding non-atomic tests and suggests splitting them into smaller atomic tests when possible. He also explains different ways to set an application state using various techniques such as Javascript injection, restful API, database manipulation, and cookies to create atomic tests.

Automated testing tools are crucial for modernizing a software development team's pipeline to deliver faster software. Choosing the right automated testing tools can be a pivotal point in any CI/CD initiative, and it's essential to understand the differences between various tool categories. For test creation, selecting an open-source framework like Selenium or Appium is a good starting point, considering factors such as app type, programming language, and bindings. Test management tools provide ultimate traceability, integrating with other tools and offering rich dashboards and analytics. For test execution, infrastructure options range from building from scratch to fully-hosted solutions, considering coverage needs, debugging requirements, scalability, and presentation of data. Understanding the differences between these tool categories and how they add value in test creation, management, and execution is key to choosing the right automated testing tools for specific needs.

Leaving CI/CD For Complex Tests`, LogiGear uses the Sauce Labs Continuous Testing Cloud for complex testing scenarios due to its comprehensive solution offering wide browser support, mobile devices, and platform support. This helps detect bugs on real environments faster. The service provider advocates Sauce Labs for easy pipeline setup, parallel test execution, screen recording, and debugging failed cases. A client in the entertainment industry needed to test a robotic toy/telepresence product across various browsers, environments, and languages within a tight four-hour run cycle. LogiGear used a Selenium and Appium framework with a cloud-based Selenium grid on Sauce Labs to achieve rapid test execution and overcome complex testing challenges. The combination of these tools helped the client implement Continuous Testing, reducing sprint cycles and cost savings compared to creating an in-house mobile lab. Michael Hackett, co-founder of LogiGear, has extensive experience in software engineering and is a Certified Scrum Master, having co-authored books on Software Testing and taught courses on software quality engineering and management at top universities.

This episode of Tech Talk explores the topic of removing duplication with the help of a base test class, helping users to improve their automated testing skills and create more efficient tests. Nikolay Advolokin, Sr. Developer Advocate at Sauce Labs, shares best practices for using page objects and highlights key components needed to make a page object effective.

BDD (Behavior-Driven Development) is a software development methodology that aims to reduce common wasteful activities in software development by improving communication between business and technical people. However, its implementation can be problematic when automation engineers create BDD test automation without following the principles and ideas of BDD, resulting in extra dependencies and abstractions, struggles with parallelization, and incorrect Gherkin syntax. As a result, these issues hinder the expected benefits of BDD and add complexity to the automation process.

In this Tech Talk, Sauce Labs solutions architect Nikolay Advolodkin provides a hands-on workshop to help viewers configure automated testing on Sauce Labs. The session covers best practices for test design, running automated tests in Java, and identifying what makes up a good test. It also emphasizes the importance of atomic tests, allowing developers to create more efficient and effective automated testing processes.