SOFT SKILLS OF AUTOMATION WITH JENNY BRAMBLE

Automation starts long before you open your IDE. Before you write the first line of code or inspect the first element, you need to develop a mindset that leads you to create good automation. You need the Soft Skills of Automation. In this talk, we will work on creating a framework for ourselves to start thinking about our testing as our framework does. We’ll start by interrogating the manual testing that we do and shaping it to automation. This includes teaching ourselves how to look at a page as a computer would and then determining how we can step through the elements. When you leave this talk, you will have a good idea of what it takes to think automation first, what types of testing are appropriate for automation, and what types of information we can get from automation.

Jenny came up through support and devops, cutting her teeth on that interesting role that acts as the ‘translator’ between customer requests from support and the development team. Her love of support and the human side of problems lets her find a sweet spot between empathy for the user and empathy for her team. She’s done testing, support, or human interfacing for most of her career. She finds herself happiest when she’s making an impact on other people – whether it’s helping find issues in applications, speaking at events, or just grabbing coffee and chatting.


NOW YOU’RE COOKING WITH OBSERVABILITY! WITH MARK TOMLINSON

Cooking and the food we eat can be related to observability in many ways. Join Mark Tomlinson as he dives deep into some of the questions that we should ask ourselves every day about the food on our table and the systems that we work on like: How do I know it's safe to eat this meat? Is this providing the service my end users need? Would I know if my food was secure on its journey to my table? Do we know what happens between point a and point b?

Mark Tomlinson is a performance engineering and software testing consultant. His career began in 1992 with a comprehensive two-year test for a life-critical transportation system, a project which captured his interest for software testing, quality assurance, and test automation. Mark assists with coaching, training and consulting to help organizations adopt modern performance testing and engineering strategies, practices and behaviors for better performing technology systems. He is the co-founder and host of the popular podcast PerfBytes (www.perfbytes.com). He has broad experience with real-world scenario testing of large and complex systems and is regarded as a leading expert in software testing automation with a specific emphasis on performance.


Exploratory Pipelines with Maaret Pyhäjärvi

Maaret is joining us from across the ocean to talk about exploratory testing--in particular, how exploratory testing enables us with pipelines and getting our software to done.

Maaret Pyhäjärvi is an exploratory tester extraordinaire with a day-job at Vaisala as Principal Test Engineer. She is a tester, (polyglot) programmer, speaker, author, conference designer and a community facilitator. She is Most Influential Agile Testing Professional Person 2016 and Top-100 Most Influential in ICT in Finland 2019.


COMMUNICATING TEST RESULTS - JANET GREGORY

There are a few very important questions to ask stakeholders before you determine what results need to be reported, how you report them and who needs to know them. Test results need to be valuable to somebody, so reporting for the sake of reporting, is sometimes wasted effort. If teams have a strategy for making them visible and available with a minimal amount of work, they can spend more time on doing valuable work.

In this session Janet Gregory explores what types of questions to ask to get the answers that make the test results most valuable, and ways to make them visible to all who need the information.


DOCKER WORKSHOP - JOHN GOODMAN

John will show you a working example of using docker-compose to integration test ASP .NET Core. We will build the app together from scratch, with tests. The app won't do much, but, actually, that's how his company does it. They start with tests from the inception of the application and work up to the features it provides.


FAKER - ERIC AYALA

Have you ever tested an application where you had to enter unique information for every test run? One of the most challenging parts of testing an application is creating unique sets of data: be it names, addresses, phone numbers, or countless other pieces of information. Many of us make up unique data on the spot, hardcode it, or store manually generated information in Excel files. What if there was a way to generate unique data quickly and easily? Enter Faker.

Faker is a library available in several different languages that allows for unique data generation for your tests. In this presentation I will talk about the challenges of test automation that requires unique data and how Faker can be leveraged to give your tests dynamic information for every test run. We will talk about how this approach can be used to help maintain your automated tests, and how generating dynamic data might help you uncover bugs in your application.


PerfBytes Answers All Your Performance Questions - Mark Tomlinson

Today’s modern engineering teams are working on new ways to deal with complexity and scale for systems that challenge our traditional practices for performance testing and engineering. Whether you are dealing with a spread of micro services, disparate data sources, dynamic API frameworks or rapid change in functionality, it’s even more difficult to manage and optimize your application’s performance. For this virtual meetup, Mark will artfully cover the top changes to our thinking and approaches for performance work including: observability and monitoring, artificial intelligence, risk and threat detection, pre-release testing, performance pipelines, elasticity and client-side web performance. Come with your organization's questions on performance, he might even be able to help you with your dog training.


Working in Babel: Stories of Multilingualism in Software Development - areti panou

We often hear that different roles in a development team speak “different languages” meaning that they have diverse understandings of a situation. But what happens when they literally speak different languages?

In this presentation I want to talk about my 10 year experience of working in my non-native language, first as a tester and now as a product owner. The impact that thinking in Greek, writing in English and speaking in German has to my day to day work. The effects it has when I try to learn something new, relevant to my each role. How it relates to my understanding of the environment and market the product I am working for is in. And finally, how it influences the communication and collaboration within my team.