Ask Me Anything: Automation - Marie Drake

🗓️ Events
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2

Marie mentioned a talk from @carloskidman at TestBash San Francisco

and from @angiejones

Marie also mentioned k6 and other performance testing tools, I’ve previously linked her blog posts about those tools here Performance: which testing tool and why?

Questions we didn’t get to

  1. What should I suggest to someone interested in learning automation where and how to start?

  2. How do you get development teams to take ownership of writing and maintaining automated tests, to avoid having a separate QA team do it?

  3. How proficient does automated QA need to be in coding ? A lot of qas in auto these days used to be developers

  4. How to convince developers to maintain and add tests to the automation suite?

  5. I am working in a fintech company and I want to show the value of the api testing on business logic. What things do you think are appropriate to assert aside from the status code and the response body in this context?

  6. Other than exploratory testing, where automation is not recommended? Also, do you think exploratory testing could be automated?

  7. Are there any performance tester courses you can recommend? I have some practical experience of automatoin, including recently doing perf testing using Gatling, which worked out well. However I’d like to possibly do a professional-level course to give me any additional perf testing theory and a certificate. Thanks.

  8. How do you (or your team) decide what to automate and what NOT to automate?

  9. Should test automation code follow and conform to developer coding standards such as checkstyle? or should it be kept separate?

  10. Why is mobile automation (like Appium) so hard to setup?

  11. How do you measure success/fail of your automation efforts?

  12. Do you know of any good online sources that would help people get up to speed in automation.
    Suggestions from the other attendees:

  1. What tools do you use to report automation tests? have you used Xray JIRA plugin before?

  2. is manual qa dying out ?

  3. Have you used visual testing tools like applitools Eyes or Percy.io for example. Do they have value?

  4. API automation, what strategy do you have for a very very big data? How many permutations to cover?

  5. Integration/E2E for System of System testing: most large organisations still have monolithic applications (that do not lend themselves to contract testing) any suggestions for tools to automate, or processes that may assist with semi automation of this?

  6. How do you handle the need to login in an automated test?

  7. When testing a mobile app, do you handle some steps outside of the UI (eg: Api) for less execution time?

  8. We are struggling to find time to develop test automation framework. QA Manager - Overseeing the status of each story; qa process; SDET - understand requirements - design test plan and test scenarios - create test data Offshore testers- responsible to write test cases in detail steps based on SDET’s test plan and scenarios - execute test cases manually. Please share how your team’s process is like. Any advice how we can improve based on current responsibility

  9. Please describe your latest test automation process. Which type of automation tests, how many (i.e. compared to other types), who wrote what, who decided scenarios, who organised/managed everything etc.

  10. Is it legit to practice automation by contributing to open source projects?

  11. Do your tests use existing data or create new data?

  12. What website can we go to learn and practice test automation?

  1. Is Java King for Automation, or is Javascript better for Frontend Testing?

  2. Does the cost of all the tools justifies itself? (applitest, cypress, k6 etc)

  3. When automating UI, do you keep your assertions in the UI or do you assert in different levels (Database for instance)?

  4. What is Automation?

  5. What do you think about quality assistance (especially in automation field) as a means for upping overall sprint/team productivity and what about the downsides, i.e. how do we ensure we still do great testing?

  6. if required to automated a COTS application with customized business logic within it? Do you have any suggestions on how to accomplish it?

  7. Are you able to suggest any approaches to retiring and updating tests in an automation regression pack?

  8. What coding language should we prioritize to learn to help us get started?

  9. What can be the lessons learned for teams starting with Infrastructure as Code deployments & testing from a more traditional testing automation perspective? Thank you!

  10. I am curious about internationalization automated testing for mobile apps. how do you check how an app looks in different languages?

  1. How do you test for email notifications during test automation?
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