AutomationGuild 2024 Lineup and BIG News with Joe Colantonio

[00:00:04] Get ready to discover the most actionable end-to-end automation advice from some of the smartest testers on the planet. Hey, I'm Joe Colantonio, host of the Test Guild Automation Podcast, and my goal is to help you succeed with creating automation awesomeness.

[00:00:25] Joe Colantonio I can't believe at the time of this recording was only two weeks away from the 8th Annual Online Automation Guild. I started this in 2016, 2017, way before, there were any 100% online events dedicated to automation testing. Since then, I think we really set the bar and the standard for what an online automated testing event should be, and that is an independent community-led and driven conference. Every year I ask past automation guild attendees what their number one thing is that they're struggling with. And based on their feedback, I seek out speakers for sessions on those topics. I then asked The Guild to vote on what submitted session topics they would like to see at the next event, and based on that and some other community factors, I determined the Automation Guild lineup. Today, I want to announce the opening of registration and the full lineup for Automation Guild 2024 going on February 5th to the 9th. And I'm always trying to make things better for the community. And at this year's Automation Guild, we're taking community to a whole new level in four main ways. The first one is, rather than use Slack, we've moved to a new community platform called HeartBeat, which has a whole bunch of features to make the conference and community a bunch better. The first is we can keep all the history for all events forever. So if you had an excellent conversation during the event and forgot what exactly was said, or if there was too that was recommended to you, you can go back in any time and simply search and find that conversation. It's wicked easy. We also extended the learning awesomeness all year long. After the event is over, our attendees will not only get lifetime access to all the recordings and conversations that went on during the event, but you're also going to get 9 months more of continual education in the Automation Guild community, with one new expert joining us with a new, timely, hands-on training session specifically for Automation Guild attendees for this year. So this is not just a one-and-done event. It's a hybrid membership community experience. Third, we have Chris Trimper, who is a guild founding member, stepping in officially to take the role of community manager. He's been helping out since we started, but officially has the role of community manager, who's been doing an awesome job so far when we made the transition from Slack to Heartbeat. And the fourth one is based on survey results, many attendees said that they would like some workshop-style sessions. So with the five-day ticket, we're giving you two 90-minute workshops. The first one is laying the groundwork, preparing for automation testing success, and the other is mastering XCUI tests native iOS test automation. We're trying a bunch of new things. We're always trying to make things better. Also, I think we've also perfected the format of the event. So if you're new to the Automation Guild, you might know how it works, basically what it is. I first asked the speakers to prerecord this session so I can show the best audio-video quality. I then streamed this session during the event. The reason why I do this is so they don't have to worry about demos. Everything is there. And also I ask them to be in the community during the session replay time so they can interact with any attendees. Ask them questions so that folks can watch the session, but they can also interact with the speaker during the session and after the session is done, I pulled them in for live Q&A so you can interact with them live, and ask them any questions you might have. I feel this is the best of both worlds. You get a quality session and you get to see, speak, and interact with the speaker live as well. Like I said this, the 8th annual one. We've done this every year with the same format and survey results say people love this format. And finally, I think you're getting so much value from the Guild that I stand behind these experts. So much so that we have a 90-day money-back awesomeness guarantee. So if you can honestly tell me after the event you got zero value from the online event, we will refund your money, no questions asked. How many other events do that? I don't think any other event does that. And so I'm proud to tell you that over seven years, with thousands of folks attending, we've only had two ever ask for a refund. If you haven't registered yet, if you haven't checked out the lineup, you don't want to miss this event. Like I said, it's going to be the biggest one ever with a lot of value going on all year long. To check it out, go to Testguild.com and click on the Automation Guild button in the main menu area. And so if you're watching the video version, you can already tell it's going to be a Dungeons and Dragons-type theme. So it's going to be a really fun theme to really keep people really interactive throughout the five days. What does our lineup look like this year? I like to share a few session teasers to give you a taste of what you're going to get to help you improve and upskill your automation this year. If you register for Automation Guild right now, the first one was the highest-voted session that guild members said they wanted at this year's event. It's by Lee Barnes and it is about the path to become a test automation rock star. Let's check it out.

[00:05:34] Lee Barnes We're not going to talk about next-generation frameworks or implementation patterns, or how to level up your programming skills. What we are going to talk about is how to continuously add value to your organization because that's what rock stars do. We're going to talk about how to assess yourself. Look at a mind map for the various areas that you need to have as a foundation to becoming a rock star test automation engineer. And then we're going to look at the pathway to getting there. Most importantly, we're going to look at how to take a more context-driven approach to test automation to ensure that we're not just automating for the sake of automation. Let's get started. If we want to become effective test automation engineers, I think it's important to understand what effective test automation looks like. First and foremost, effective test automation impacts the right metrics. If we're implementing test automation, then that means we're part of a team that's developing software. And if we're developing software, then that means we're trying to solve a business problem. We want test automation to be a means to an end. The end being delivering value to our customers. So it needs to support our business goals. Next, effective test automation is focused on high-value activities and tests. I'm going to get on my soapbox here for a second and talk about test automation metrics.

[00:06:47] Anna Patterson Hello, Automation Guild crowd, and welcome to my session. I'm happy to see you here. I'm Anna Patterson, I'm a principal software test engineer at Everfi. And today, we will talk about API testing. While I'm getting started with my presentation, feel free to drop in the chat what tools you're currently using for API testing. All right, accelerating API testing: A practical Guide to Automation with Cypress. Today, we will cover the benefits of API testing. Why use Cypress for API testing? I will also do a demo of how to write your first API test using Cypress and share additional resources for further learning. As most of us in QA community know, API testing plays a crucial role in ensuring the reliability, functionality, and security of modern software applications. There are a lot of extended benefits API testing can provide, as it facilitates early identification and resolution of integration issues, as well as enables quicker feedback during development and continuous integration. It also allows you to interact directly with a data layer, making it easier to validate data accuracy and consistency. You might ask why use automation tools for API testing while we can already do manual testing using great tools like Postman?

[00:08:05] Artem Bondar Hello guys, my name is Artem Bondar, and thank you for joining this session with me today where we talk about Cypress and Playwright which one to choose? So a few words about me. I'm a test automation engineer with multiple years of experience, and also I am an instructor on Udemy and on my own platform, Bondar Academy, where I teach students how to use Cypress and Playwright framework. I am familiar with those frameworks pretty well and in today's session, I hope we'll help you to figure out which framework to choose. For example, if you are switching from Selenium to a new framework and don't know which framework will be the best fit for your test application, or for example, you are thinking about picking up your first test automation framework and don't know yet which one to start Cypress or Playwright. Both of those frameworks are very powerful and are trending right now in the test automation world. And in this presentation today, we will not talk more about like technical specifics of those frameworks. You can find that information online, in YouTube, and in testing of those frameworks one by one. We will talk about more about the context, about the application of those frameworks, how the differences between frameworks can result in your decision-making, on which framework to choose for your company, for your application, for your particular project. And I hope this presentation will help you to give you this answer. And also there will be a bonus lecture. We will talk about using a facing Locator. This concept was implemented by the Playwright and presented by the Playwright. Recently at least I didn't see it before. And these concepts help you to create more resilient and more stable locators for your script. So I will show you how this is implemented in the Playwright, and also how you can use this same approach in Cypress, in case you already using Cypress and want to make your test even more stable. So let's get into it.

[00:10:13] Karime Salomon Hi everyone, I will be presenting The Load Test in Expedition: A beginners quest for practical application. But first of all, I'm going to introduce myself. I am Karime Salomon. I am from Bolivia and I have more than 12 years of experience in technology. I initially started as a web developer, and then I had a great opportunity to be part of the QA team. I started as a manual tester. Then I moved to work with automation. Then I had a great opportunity to be a tech lead. I was working with different teams with functional and nonfunctional tests and then everything for load test and the performance came in for me. And then I had the opportunity to go to work as a QA manager and then a security director handling multiple lines of business. I'm really happy to be here, and I hope this is going to be really useful for you. Let's start with it. Okay. So let's start the expedition. First of all, everybody is going to ask the question why do I need a load test or is this really important for me? And maybe this is a question that many of us was having in the past.

[00:11:26] Welcome to Automation Guild 2024. This session is about Skyrocketing your test coverage with model-based testing. So I'm Rahul Parwal, I work as a specialist with IFM Engineering. First of all, I want to thank each and every one of you who has been so supportive out there posting your questions, posting your thoughts on the social media posts, LinkedIn, and so on. And today I'll be talking about a test design approach, which is model-based testing, where I'll be talking about how do you do test design using mathematical computations on a graph, on a model, using nodes, edges, and so on. And how you can quickly perform a very quick impact analysis on your models, on your testing strategy, and your approach whenever your requirements change or update. And also, we're talking about visual modeling, the benefits that visual modeling gives, and how it helps in better communication, clarity, and overall collaboration with the team. And how do you use it to communicate your testing long mindset to your stakeholders, team, developers, and beyond? So this talk is about that. Let's start the session. Hi. So let's kick start our discussion on Skyrocketing Test coverage with model-based testing.

[00:12:41] Hey everyone, I've got a question for you. Do you k now how to fight monsters? Well me neither. But of course, monsters aren't real. I checked. But what about invisible monsters? Well, they aren't real as well, but it sometimes feels like they are. I personally feel like I have been fighting them my whole professional life. As a test automation engineer, responsible for a thousands of end-to-end tests, and probably just as many test flakes. I want to talk about test flakiness in end-to-end testing today because I feel like this is something that many of us have experience with. But the solutions for these problems are not shared as often. Even the term test flakiness seems to carry some ambiguity. So let me provide a definition that I'm going to be working with during this talk. A flaky test is a test that has had a passing and a failing result across multiple executions, without a known change in the test code or in the code of the application under test. What causes the test to pass once and then fail another time?

[00:13:50] Hi everyone! Hope you're enjoying the automation awesomeness in Automation Guild 2024 as much as I am doing. So today, we'll be talking about the trending topic conversational AI chatbot chatbots in the era of conversational AI. Building a robust test strategy to elevate experiences. There are various questions on the net, like how to test the chatbot. What kind of testing can we do for a chatbot? Is it really feasible? Will chatbots take away the testing job or testers would be smart enough to test them right? Of course, it's confusing as AI testing surpasses the traditional tactic testing methods. So we as technologists need to rewire our approach to embrace this dynamic system with our continuous testing strategies that align well with this evolving nature of AI. There are many additional factors that we need to consider to test the chatbots.

[00:15:01] Dan Reale Hi everyone, I'm Dan Reale, lead QA engineer at Dun & Bradstreet. Today, I'm going to be smoking. I mean, talking about smoke testing. I'm going to go through a personal case study, go through some tips and tricks, and a demo of a side project where we'll review some of the smoke tests. Now, let's get smoking. Story time. Once upon a time, there was a team who had a web application in production making millions of dollars with no QA resources. When a QA resource was hired, they determined much was needed to ensure the quality of the application going forward, from creating a larger regression suite to load and performance testing, monitoring to accessibility test, and beyond. That resource looking to understand the application in greater detail started by meeting with the product teams to understand the key user workflows in the application. This conversation spawned the beginning of the smoke test to check the product's functionality. That QA resource was me. Now, about six months later, we had a major project to migrate cloud platforms. We were migrating off of AWS to GCP. GCP is a Google Cloud Platform for those unfamiliar. And so the team relied on the QA team for their regression suite. And to make sure that once the migration happened, we could test the application fully and ensure that the application was still working the way it was intended to. So as we were getting ready for the official launch, we had some dry runs that we were conducting as a team.

[00:16:31] Dave Piacente Hello and welcome to my talk on Redefining Test Automation, I'm Dave Piacente. Let's get started. I think before I get too far, it's worth talking about my story just real briefly. For those of you that may not know me, I've been in test automation since around 2009, either attending or speaking at conferences and meetups, and I did that until about five years ago. I took a job as a software engineer, working with Applitools in the research and development team. And after a couple of years, I realized that I wanted to focus more on just being heads down as an engineer. And I took a break from being in the public spaces, in public speaking, and still was in test automation working large in building, helping build products at Applitools. I was still well-versed in what's going on in the industry, just not really paying attention to the talks that were going on. And then more recently, I moved into out of R&D and engineering specifically and into this new role where I focus on doing developer advocacy and community-focused activities. And so I started more recently paying attention and getting up to speed on what people are talking about again. In the industry, I figured, well, it's been some time since I've been doing this. I'll step in and it'll be like jumping ahead light years. Five years. It's a long time. And what I realized is that it's still largely as an industry talking about the same things. And I was a bit surprised by that. And so I thought, well, maybe that could be a good opportunity to talk about where I was thinking.

[00:18:08] Hello, Greg Pascal here with The Craft of Testing and also The Automation Guild 2024. It's great to be here with you today. I've worked in automation for 40 years. I can't believe it. That goes back quite a bit of time and some very early systems that would be interesting to get my hands on these days. But still, through that process, it's helped me to learn an awful lot about what makes test automation successful and what doesn't. Even those early skills, that foundation I find I still apply many of those same concepts today. Now, if you've heard me on my YouTube channel, or maybe here on Joe Colantonio's podcast, you know that I talk a lot about software testing and about automation. And so today, it's been a real honor to be able to share on this topic. What does it mean to move into craftsmanship in the work of automation? Now, some of you really aspire to do more than just write your daily test automation. Maybe that's your day job and that's what you do, but you have to strive to become more and do more with your skills. And really, my talk is focused to you.

[00:19:18] Pricilla Bilavendran Every data to be protected, especially our data. We'll be very cautious when we are exposed to do some external registration and all those things. But when it comes to APIs as well as of course, finally, in turn your APIs are also going to expose data when they are not being protected in the right way. Today's talk will be more focused with the topic Safeguarding Digital Assets, Uncovering Security risks, and APIs. So let's learn together. So yes, just a bit of introduction about me. I'm Pricilla and I work as a team leader at Billennium IT Services, Malaysia. And yes, I'm a mother of a six-year-old boy and I'm associated with multiple organizations like tools or testing-based ones for all the ambassadorship programs. I'm part of Postman Supernova and I'm part of AWS community builder and lambda test. I'm a Momentic Network ambassador, and I'm a certified mentor whenever time permits I do free mentoring sessions for the budding test engineers. This is a small introduction about me.

[00:20:20] And yes. So what do we have in for today? It's going to be about first the introduction to API security. And then let's go over about OWASP top 10 for APIs like what are the top 10 vulnerabilities that you should learn about that you should have a knowledge about? And then we as testers, because you can ask me like, Hey, Pricilla, I'm no security expert. What do you think that I'll be able to contribute to the security testing part because I'm dealing and I'm handling with more of the APIs nowadays? Of course, you can. We all have a way to contribute back to this security testing process for the APIs. And finally, we'll just do a recap before we ended of. Yes. Why API testing?

[00:21:03] Daniel Knott Hi everyone, and welcome to my talk Remove the Pain from Test Automation. My name is Daniel Knott and I'm happy that you're here to join all together The Automation Guild 2024 with us to talk about mobile testing, automation, new trends and testing and whatnot. Thanks, Joe, for having me today. And so let's jump right into today's talk. So here we are Remove the pain from test automation. What is this all about? Before we dive into the topic, quick introduction for myself. For those who don't know me, my name is Daniel Knott, happy that you're here. I am 39 years old living in Germany, and right now I'm working as the head of product engineering at a company called MaibornWolff in Germany. But for those who don't know me, I'm a mobile tester by heart. I started mobile testing in 2010 when I was allocated to the first mobile team, and back then there was literally no mobile testing tools available or no mobile testing knowledge around because apps just came around the corner and it was for me, it was a green field, and over the course of the time, I developed a lot of knowledge and I love to share my knowledge. And I am doing this on my blog, Adventures in QA. But also I wrote a book about mobile testing and also smartwatch app testing. And since two years, I'm also having my own YouTube channel talking all kinds of topics of software testing, testing-related topics, mobile testing of course, as well. Lately a lot of stuff in AI. So if you haven't watched it yet, take a look at the video description and to find the link to my channel. But without no cut to the chase, no cheesy marketing anymore. Let's go right into the topic, Removing The Pain From Test Automation, and why it's so important to talk about. So this is what I would like to talk about first current state of the mobile market flow. Some pretty amazing numbers I would say. Then I would like to briefly talk about the mobile testing challenges. And then we go hands-on in automation stuff and show you how easy it can be to set up from scratch. Today we do something from scratch in automation a few seconds and then last but not least, quick summary resources. And then I'm here for your questions. So current state of mobile.

[00:23:19] Test automation maturity is the level of sophistication and reliability of automated tests, and the extent to which test automation is integrated into the software development lifecycle. Organizations with high test automation maturity level will have well-defined test automation strategies, a sustainable test automation framework, and a culture of continuous improvement. I'm Geetha, a passionate software testing professional with over 20 years of experience into test automation. Throughout my career, I had the privilege to help client solve their challenges through innovative solutions. I was involved in developing testing accelerators that had significantly improved efficiency and effectiveness of testing processes. I have also authored several white papers promoting best practices. Today, I'm excited to be here to share some of the practical approaches to boost test automation maturity. Let's get started. So here is the agenda for today's session. So we will be diving deep into four major metrics. And then we'll talk about a few strategies to improve the metrics and the benefits for each of these metrics. So to start with the test automation maturity.

[00:24:42] Speaker 6 Hi everyone and welcome to my session. From the title, you already know that we are going to talk about clean code, but you might be surprised that we are not going to talk about the page of repattern or clean ... or what is better CSS or XPath. Rather, I want to tell you about more fundamental things that could help you to build a scalable and reliable test automation framework. It will be very practical session with many code examples. So let's start. So let's dive into our presentation. Just to introduce myself I am technical lead of automation team at AirSlate. I'm doing test automation over the last six years. And preferably it's for back-end, front-end, and also mobile. I'm passionate about effective test automation under effective. I mean that, for example, at AirSlate, I reduced release cycle by four times with an automation test. Also, I am a public speaker, so I am speaking about test automation on different conferences like today. And also I'm writing technical articles and producing some content about engineering and test automation. And so I actually also I'm serving some times meetups. So feel free to follow me. Let's talk about the capabilities of a good test. First of all, test should be readable because it takes less time to debug and less time to make a conclusion. What happens from the product and where is the bug? The next capability is speed. Your tests should be fast. And I ignored the terrible stories about eight hours nightly build. It's a terrible tactic, don't use it. Test should be scalable and could run very, very quickly.

[00:26:25] Joe Colantonio Thank you. All the experts that are sharing at this year's Automation Guild, as I mentioned, all these speakers will also be in the community all year long so you can interact with them on an ongoing basis for any question you might have that you're struggling with at work at any time. Plus, you definitely want to check out the full lineup. Just go to Testguild.com and click on that Automation Guild button to see all the speakers and sessions.

[00:26:50] And for all the links of value we covered in this episode, head on over to testguild.com/a481. All right, that's it for this episode of the Test Guild Automation Podcast. I'm Joe, and my mission is to help you succeed with creating end-to-end full-stack automation awesomeness. Hope to see you at this year's Automation Guild. And as always, test everything and keep the good. Cheers!

[00:27:14] Hey, thanks again for listening. If you're not already part of our awesome community of 27,000 of the smartest testers, DevOps, and automation professionals in the world, we'd love to have you join the FAM at Testguild.com and if you're in the DevOps automation software testing space or you're a test tool provider and want to offer real-world value that can improve the skills or solve a problem for the Guild community. I love to hear from you head on over to testguild.info And let's make it happen.