daily post

“Life does not happen to you, it happens for you”

A line that resonated with me immediately and here’s why

Has it ever happened similar events keep happening in your life?

Is it just bad luck?

I’ve felt there is always a reason for why events out of our control take place

Sometimes we’re able to figure out the lesson we were meant to learn, a lot of times the meaning remains hidden

And until we understand why this is here, different events might keep on manifesting for us to learn

To lean and go to the next stage in life

If we choose to believe everything happens for a reason, we have a better chance at improving and being more content

#QsDaily

Running tests in Parallel?

It’s not just about what tool to use

1. Why do you need parallel execution?
To reduce execution time yes, but are all the tests running needed? Or can they be executed at different stages of the SDLC instead of one go?

2. Are your tests designed keeping in mind parallel execution?
More here: https://goo.gl/977JEP

3. Parallel execution environment setup
Depends on the tooling you are using and the AUT. Few options I know of with open source:

– Selenium Grid (will run on single machine)
– Jenkins + VM – with Selenium running on multiple VMs / environments
– Jenkins + Docker – Running on a docker server where multiple containers running different tests in parallel. Can manage the parallel execution through Jenkins
– Jenkins + SaaS – services like BrowserStack, SauceLabs etc.
– Zalenium – Docker based Selenium grid. More here: https://goo.gl/pqXoQW

#QsDaily #Docker #Jenkins #TestAutomation

Continuous testing just a buzz word or can it really help you?

To quote my all-time favorite book ‘The teams to take a product from idea to the market will win’

Here’s how I explain it:

Bottom line of a company – Sales

The best way to predict sales and improve them? – Go and sell the product

Unless you don’t have anything to give to your customers, no way to get feedback from them

For decades we tried to ‘model’ markets, trends, buyer personas and so on

Sometimes actual results were around our estimate, mostly way off mark

Then we thought, let’s forget to try and ‘simulate’ the environment, let’s just put it out there instead

The reason for simulations and models was it took too much time to build a deliverable product

With all concepts around Agile, CI, CT, CD, DevOps, we are trying to move from once in a 6 month delivery to multiple times a ‘Day’

Still thinking if continuous testing can help?

A video I did on the subject:

#QsDaily #ContinuousTesting #DevOps #CI #CD

What are they and how are they related

AI –

is ‘Artificial’ since the machine will not be ‘aware’ and is only working from a set of mathematical formulas under a specific context

Intelligence – is relevant, a computer can beat the best chess player ever, but has no concept of winning or losing. Can we call VA’s like Siri ‘really’ intelligent?

So why call it intelligent? The same reason we started calling phones ‘smart’!

ML –

To develop ‘intelligence’, machines are ‘trained’ to answer specific questions in a given context

There are different ways in which machine learning is done, one is ‘pattern recognition’

To the problem we want to solve, a large sample answer set is ‘programmed’ in the machine

So when an actual problem is given, the machine matches the ‘patterns’ it sees with the patterns it was trained on..

#QsDaily #ArtificialIntelligence #MachineLearning #AI #ML

So these are the basic steps an automation tool does:

Wait, Find, Action – Repeat..

(Still thinking / exploring a cool name for this)

“Wait”  for the AUT and automation tool to be in sync, and the object loaded and ready to interact with

“Find”  OnLy the ‘Desired’ object “ALWAYS”

“Action”  should be compatible with supported browsers / environments and handling the usual errors (delete previous text in text field etc.)

What I really wanted to talk about today were delays (wait). I hope most people reading know this, but it’s too important so I’ll repeat

First we established how important delays are, there 1/3rd of the whole automation! (in a way)

Second, here are my “object delay rules”:

1. Have a delay BEFORE interacting with ANY object “ALWAYS”

2. NEVER use a static delay, ALWAYS a dynamic delay

3. Check for not just if the object is visible, is it READY to interact with? *

If you do these three things with delays, you should be fine

* Exceptions are always there, but they should be the “exception”..

#QsDaily #AutomationFrameworkDesign #TestAutomation

“Within 6 months we’ll automate the testing”..

A goal one of the prospective client’s had for me, you can guess what happened next..

I understand that was a way to sell automation to management for budget approval, but was a horribly wrong statement

I’m glad to announce I never agreed to the crazy plan

The root of all this, IMHO, lies in misunderstanding what testing is

The idea of ‘testing’ being automated is impossible, unless we can create ‘Autobots’ or ‘Desepticons’!

‘Testing’ is a process of thinking, communicating with people, strategizing and continually adapting

We don’t have sophisticated enough systems to do that right now, and not sure when we will reach there if ever

But then how do you convince management that automation benefits everyone?

Here are my thoughts on calculating automation ROI:

#QsDaily #TestAutomation #AutomationRoi #Testing

Deciding what to automate?

Let’s decide what to ‘TEST’ first..

This is a follow up post from earlier where I mentioned METS

The idea of METS is to have a concise look of the important features quickly

And this is not needed for planning testing only , rather far more important for automation

Unless we are automating “what’s important”, we’ll get nowhere..

So first decide what to test, then talk what to automate

In this video I discuss the importance of deciding what to test first:

#QsDaily #testautomation #testing

Automation ‘Wisdom’ reinvented

I’m guilty too, thinking I was the first to discover some automation wisdom

The reality is, thorughout the decades of evolution in automation and automation tools, there have been common misconceptions ‘discovered’ again and again

And probably a lot of folks starting new in that wave of evolution were not aware about these problems seen in the past

In a talk with @Jim Hazen, we touch base on the same topic and Jim shares his experiences around it:

#QsDaily #TestAutomation #AutomationEvolution #TechnologicalExcellence

To write ‘traditional’ test cases or not

Whichever camp you are in, we all agree they are time consuming

There are many methods suggested in the community to document scenarios rather than all the ‘mundane’ steps

It becomes easy to refer and update, and takes less time to write

One such method was presented by @Greg Pascal at the #TestingGuild hosted by @Joe , which I loved instantly

It’s a one liner summary of test scenarios for one module with rows listing feature names and 4 columns signifying the scenario’s importance from critical to low

Sample sheet:
https://goo.gl/AggDE6

I like the concept because it’s simple and easy to
update

With ‘agile’ kicked in, it’s been a big excuse to NOT document ANYTHING, which has made domain knowledge a problem

IMHO, testing strategies like METS could be of great help in such cases

For more on that, here’s Greg’s website on the subject:

#TestCases #Testing

When I started learning #docker it was a bit confusing

To ease the learning curve, here’s how I explain docker to testers:

(simplifying things A LOT to make it easy to understand here)

1. Imagine a windows environment ‘X’ running on a desktop machine
2. Now create an image of that environment ‘Y’
3. Run that image (Y) on top of your desktop environment (X)
4. Any app running on Y would not affect X right? So that’s the first thing to appreciate.

5. Now whats common between X and Y? The OS, windows in this case.
6. So let’s take out what’s common, the OS. Remove the duplicate one from Y

And that’s what Docker does, it removes the duplicate OS and related resources, and uses the OS from X for running stuff on Y as well

All this while maintaining the isolation of both environments..

Along with a bunch of other benefits that come with this..

To read on the evolution towards docker and a brief intro on how it works: