Q & A with the Selenium Committee moderated by Anand Bagmar

Selenium Grid can be a bit daunting to get up and running. Starting it is quite easy, but using it effectively can require pulling in third-party tools. In this workshop we’ll cover how to run your grid effectively, using best practices culled from several large grid installations.

We learn more from our failures than our successes. I want to share one of my failure stories, where I learned that coding is not the most important task in Test Automation.

A failure taught me that coding is not the most important task in Test Automation. I fixed a bug, added tests, and shipped it to production. After that, a bug report came in showing that the fix created a new bug. I felt bad, I did not understand how that happened. A hotfix solved the issue, but the root cause was not addressed: what did I miss?

By taking a step back, I understood the situation, it all happened by overseeing basic concepts in testing (like understanding how the system works). The problem was that coding had more priority than creating a test plan. After this, I prioritized tasks better to avoid this situation to happen again.

This talk shows that testing concepts are more important than ever, in a time where tools promise to do everything, we focus less on what and how to test, and more in using tools to test. It outlines how a test strategy can leverage a continuous testing setup. Finally, it shows that failing is ok, but failing again for the same reasons is not.

Mobile is everywhere, and everyone wants a piece of it. All companies want to have mobile apps for their products, lots developers want to code mobile apps, and lots testers want to build awesome tests and frameworks for mobile apps…

But, what about the infrastructure? Does someone want to spend endless days building a test infrastructure for Android and iOS apps? Not so many people have the time and patience to put all the pieces together and make them work like a Swiss watch. It just seems that many people forget that tests also need a solid infrastructure to be reliable.

In this talk, I will narrate the journey I went through while doing the job that not so many people want, building a mobile testing infrastructure. The attendants will see all the steps taken in the process of planning the system architecture, how all the components were selected, and how they were put together.

More importantly, I will share the lessons learned and the open source components that are being used in the final solution, and also guidelines on how to scope the needed resources when building your own mobile testing infrastructure.

Sometimes it is hard to know what to test in a web application, and the first step before testing is defining what we want to test. This may sound trivial, but in reality this is often not done properly. We tend to oversee the obvious and we test without knowing what we want to accomplish.

What do we want to achieve? Validate user behaviour? Check if the page design is responsive on different devices? Or maybe to know that our web application looks like we expect.

When we know the purpose of our test, we can start planning, coding, executing and improving our tests. But most importantly, we will know what approach we can use to develop the test.

Functional, layout and visual testing are the three pillars of the UI testing trinity. We can use these approaches to develop focused tests, tests that are asserting a specific aspect of our web application.

But how can we identify what approach to use? When should we combine them? There is an information overflow that presents a huge variety of tools that can help us to test through any of these approaches. Sadly, this large amount of information is making us focus more on the tools instead of focusing on the testing strategy.

The intention of this talk is to break in pieces the process of identifying how to develop a focused test, and more importantly, to understand when it makes sense to combine functional testing with layout or visual testing, and what to consider before using layout or visual testing.

The talk will then go deeper through scenarios and code examples that show how to create layout and visual tests. It will also discuss scenarios where a functional test is not enough, or where a visual test is better than a layout test. This talk’s main goal is to offer a different perspective when testing a web application through the UI testing trinity.

If you are interested in how to integrate layout or visual testing to your current workflow, you should attend this talk!

Note: Thanks to the feedback I got after presenting this topic at SauceCon 2018, I have been able to make nice improvements to the content that will be helpful for the attendants.

Selenium Grid can be a bit daunting to get up and running. Starting it is quite easy, but using it effectively can require pulling in third-party tools. In this workshop we’ll cover how to run your grid effectively, using best practices culled from several large grid installations.