W10(Full Day): Rapid Software Test Automation

Test automation is a hot topic. If you are in the testing field, then you are probably being pressured to automate your work. But how should you go about it? Only certain specific aspects of testing can be automated, so which aspects should you focus on first? There are lots of expensive tools you could use, but there are also free tools, and maybe you can create some tools yourself. What should you NOT focus on? What traps must you try to avoid? How can AI help — or hurt?

Creating, applying, and maintaining useful automation to support testing can be immensely valuable. It’s also a huge challenge. This one-day class is designed to help you help you meet that challenge, looking through the lenses of the Rapid Software Testing methodology.

Maybe you’re a coder; maybe you’re not. This class is designed to help you either way. If don’t write code, we don’t teach you how, but we will help you learn to work immediately and productively with people who do.

In this class, we’ll help you — and through you, your organization — to expand notions of automation beyond GUI or API output checking. We will show you some creative uses of inexpensive tools. We’ll help you to analyze dimensions of cost and value, and to evaluate how different kinds of tools can help or hurt your testing. And we’ll talk about to recognize and learn from things that happen in the Secret Life of Automation.

This class is not affiliated with any tool vendor, and we don’t teach you to operate any specific tool. We may demonstrate or mention particular tools during the class, but we have not accepted and will not accept any payment or benefit from commercial interests. (We may be biased, but we have not been bribed.) We will show you how to analyze vendor claims critically.

In short, this class is about the essence of automation strategy: vision and setting goals that make sense for you and your organization.

We’ll cover:

The 11 traps of automation in testing.
Checking vs. testing: what can be automated and what can’t.
An exercise in test strategy and talking to a coder about automation.
The secret life of an automator: hidden costs.
How tools can help in primary testing vs. regression testing.
Thinking critically about the claims made by commercial tool companies.
Thinking critically about ROI — really cost, value, and risk — of various kinds of automation.
How you might apply AI in testing – and how AI can go wrong.
Demonstrations of creative ways to apply tools to testing.

Learning Objectives:

The primary goal of this class is to teach you how to plan and administer an effective strategy for applying automation to software testing.
A secondary goal is to help you avoid common traps that cause automation to be ineffective or to suck the life out of testing.

Michael Bolton

Michael Bolton is a a consultant and trainer who specializes in Rapid Software Testing (see http://www.developsense.com), a skill set and a mindset focused on high-value testing that is fast, inexpensive, credible, and accountable. He also writes extensively about testing and software development on his blog (see http://www.developsense.com/blog).

He focuses on helping people to solve testing problems that they don't know how to solve, and helping them learn how to do that for themselves. One way he does this is through teaching Rapid Software Testing—one of the world's most highly regarded classes on software testing. He works in any development context: Agile, Lean, DevOps, Scrum, or more traditional development models.