Test Automation, a term everyone in testing probably hears on a regular basis, but what is it? If we listen to consultancies and tool vendors, it is the holy grail. If we listen to some gurus in the software testing domain, it is the current and future of testing. Others are more conservative. However, you commonly hear people say Test Automation when they actually mean Automated Testing, to be frank, they have become synonyms.
This confuses the presenter, Richard Bradshaw. So, what is Test Automation? How can we succeed with it? What skills do we need to succeed with it? After pondering these questions for the last four years, he thinks he finally has some answers. Not just answers, but also a lot of actionable advice for you to take back to work. This advice will be woven between real examples like those listed above, exploring why he created them, the skills needed and how they helped with a software testing mission. To keep the balance, the presentation also includes lots of stories where the automated testing approach has failed and what to learn from it.
As a skilled tester, he uses automation and tools all the time, some he creates, some he downloads, but automated tests they are not. He has built automation to help his team create data. He has built low tech dashboards and tools to install his mobile app under test on as many devices as he could connect to his computer. He has written tiny little scripts, they saved hours on a weekly basis. All these tools provided a lot of value. He has also created numerous architectures to do automated checking, which, just like the tools, provided a lot of value. My focus on all these occasions was his software testing mission.
In this presentation, you will learn models to challenge your existing use of automation, a list of skills required to succeed with automation that you can use to plan your learning and a list of techniques to spot opportunities for valuable automation in your context
Video producer: http://seleniumconf.co.uk/