146: Top 12 Takeaways – Automation Guild Conference Recap

In this episode Joe Colantonio – the founder and host of Automation Guild, the first ever online conference dedicated 100% to test automation – will take a look back at the event, highlighting the sessions, speakers and top takeaways.

Joe will cover the following topics:

• “The difference between Applitools and Galen
• “21 Free Visual Validation Tools
• “How testing vendors are embracing open source
• “How to grade your Selenium Tests
• “PageObjects vs Screenplay pattern
• “Is BDD just for Collaboration?
• “TestOps – how automation fits into CI

Quotes & Insights from this Test Talk

• For those that don’t know Visual Testing is a quality assurance activity that is meant to verify that UI appears correctly to users. Many people confuse that with traditional, functional testing tools like Selenium and QTP/UFT, which were designed to help you test the functionality of your application through the UI.
• The Galen Framework is an open-source tool and language that lets you specify layout — for example, that a button should be centered and have a width of 20% of the screen resolution. Once you’ve completed the specification, you can use Galen to run every web page against different resolutions.
• If you start by pulling out a test file and looking at it, assume that all tests start with 100 points, and then if there are infractions, based on this rubric. He showed how you deduct points as necessary. From there, you have a percentage grade; you can basically convert it to an A through F. Then you know if your test is actually built with a good structure in mind, easy to maintain, and basically all of the automation good practices.
• The Screenplay Pattern (formerly known as the Journey Pattern) is the application of SOLID design principles to automated acceptance testing, and helps teams address these issues. It is essentially what would result from the merciless refactoring of Page Objects using SOLID design principles.
• Selenium is just an API. You really need to create a lot of custom code to add functionality to Selenium where vendor tools can act as a wrapper; adding things that most testers are familiar with, like an object spy, object repositories and reporting features.
• Often, people automatically think that investment is just about money, but you should be looking for both financial and time support. If you’re only discussing dollars and cents with your manager, you’ve missed a significant aspect of the investment actually required for effective automation.

Connect with Automation Guild

• Twitter:@AutomationGuild
• Conference: AutomationGuild.com

Resources

21 Free Visual Validation Tools

May I Ask You For a Favor?

Thanks again for listening to the show. If it has helped you in any way, shape or form, please share it using the social media buttons you see on the page.

Additionally, reviews for the podcast on iTunes are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated! They do matter in the rankings of the show and I read each and every one of them.

Test Talks is sponsored by the fantastic folks at Sauce Labs. Try it for free today!