38: Jonathon Wright: Why Test Automation is Broken

Why Test Automation is Broken

Do you have a sinking feeling that your test automation efforts are not quite right? When looking around in the industry are you starting to see that everyone else is facing the same issues? Lets face it there is something fundamentally wrong with the way we most of us approach testing and automation.

There are a lot of digital disruption coming that is going to force us to change the way we think about testing and automation.

It’s a brave new world for testers, so get ready to learn how to do “testing in wild” with Jonathon Wright leading the way.

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About Jonathon Lee Wright

Jonathon has over 15 years of international automation experience with a number of global organizations, including Lehman Brothers, Hitachi Consulting, Siemens, Thomson Reuters, New Zealand Lotteries Commission, PlanIT (Sydney), Unisys (iPSL), Xerox (BJSS), Hewlett Packard (Enterprise), and Microsoft (ALM). Currently, he provides enterprise-wide Portfolio Lifecycle Management at Deutsche Bank as part of the test automation transition initiative, targeting 2,700 applications for test automation across the bank's global digital enterprise landscape/ecosystem.

Jonathon also contributed to the best-selling book Experiences of Test Automation: Case Studies of Software Test Automation, Dorothy Graham and Mark Fewster, Addison Wesley, and a number of books on Testing as a Service (TaaS) models (epistemic and systemic entropy) and API testing in the cloud (service and network virtualization).

He is the founder of Test Automation as a Service (TaaaS.net) and Automation Development Services (automation.org.uk) and the Hybrid approach pattern (2004). He has also presented at various international testing conferences, such as Gartner (London), STARWest (California), Fusion (Sydney), ANZTB (Melbourne), EuroSTAR (Gothenburg and Dublin), BCS SIGIST (London). Further details about Jonathon can be found at www.linkedin.com/in/automation.

Quotes & Insights from this Test Talk

• We’re moving from being testers to being data scientists
• Test Automaton engineer need to understand the domain, understand the automation in their industries, and understand the technologies.
• A business should focus on its business, and not be testing competency centers
• Testing as a Service allows for instant scalability, flexible test resource, flexible test assets and flexible test execution
• The key to first day automated testing is to create a dynamic object repository based on a combination of fuzzy logic and descriptive programming supporting the design and development of test scenarios before the actual delivery of the SUT
• You need to know the limitation of using a certain automation tool. How to create reusable deign patterns that are maintainable before you even start coding your automated tests
• The more automation code is reused, the more worthwhile it is to build in recovery from unexpected errors or events and the more robust the scripts are.
• With Internet of Things the usage of machine to machine interfaces are growing at such a fast rate. Testers need to get ready for this.
• Testers have been focusing on software but there is a shift coming where we also are going to need to learn hardware
• We are going to see a lot more testing of things in the wild
• Lots of digital disruption is beginning to  happen in the testing industry
• The days of analyzing a previous days data, after an issue happens is gone,we are now in the age of “testing in the wild” where we need to be able to analyze data as it is happening to our application users.
• We need a test community cloud to share all our experiences so that we can learn from one another
• As testers we need to now look at a much wider community then just testing
• Let not build these monolithic test automation solutions- we need to ban frameworks!
• Being able to also test hardware is going to be a cultural change for testers
• Much, much more!

Books

• Testing as a Service – Models – Jonathon Wright
• Advanced UFT 12 for Test Engineers Cookbook – Meir Bar-Tal, Jonathon Wright
• Experiences of Test Automation – Dorothy Graham, Mark Fewster

Resources

• Test Automation as a Service – www.TaaaS.net

• Testing as a Service – Models – www.TestingAsAService.com

• Test Automation Patterns – Dorothy Graham,  http://TestAutomationPatterns.wikispaces.com

• Automation Maturity Model index – www.AMMi.org.uk

• Slides –  www.slideshare.net/jonathon_wright

• Dr Emma Langman, Great Insiders, Thinking in Systems Thinking, www.greatinsiders.com,  @greatinsiders

• Llyr Wyn Jones, Grid-Tools, ‘A Critique of Testing Primer: Meta-Mathematics and Meta-Development’, http://www.agile-designer.com/resources/critique-testing-primer/ , @gridtools

• Paul Gerrard, Gerrard Consulting, ‘New Model for Testing’ discussion paper published, www.gerrardconsulting.com, @paul_gerrard

• James Whittaker, Microsoft, ‘Beyond the Web and Apps: The Domestication of Knowledge’, https://medium.com/@docjamesw, @docjamesw

• Alan Page, Microsoft, ‘The Big Picture of Test Automation: Test Trustworthiness’, www.angryweasel.com, @alanpage

• Julie Gardiner, Testing-Alliance.com, ‘Avoiding Vendor-Driven Delivery’ Keynote at STARWest, www.Testing-Alliance.com, @cheekytester

• Elisabeth Hendrickson, ‘Acceptance Test Driven Development’, www.testobsessed.com, @testobsessed

• Dan North, ‘Behaviour Test Driven Development’, www.dannorth.net , @tastapod

Connect with Jonathon

• Twitter: @Jonathon_Wright
• Blog:http://www.automation.org.uk/
• Company: http://www.taaas.net/

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