3. Looking for talented, highly experienced people. Interested? Speak to Theresa
Equal Experts’ agile practitioners combine technical excellence and business pragmatism
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4. You don't need to learn
programming to Test... but it helps
Mark Winteringham
5. Automation: Time to change our models
Iain McCowatt
‘Look at the world through a different pair of lenses every time you have a problem’
www.ministryoftesting.com/2014/05/automation-time-change-models-iain-mccowatt/
Mental models
6. Jim wants to automate
checking a service validates a
range of payloads correctly
Jim builds a script in
WebDriver via the UI the
service consumes
It results in automation
that’s slow and brittle
Jim continues to tinker with
the script
It’s too hard!
‘Automator Jim’ knows
WebDriver
7. What if Jim knew about a different tool such as JMeter or SOAPUI?
‘We shape our tools and then our tools shape us’
industryweek.com
Marshall McLuhan
8. ‘Be promiscuous’
What if Jim isn’t even aware that these tools exist
or that he could benefit in learning them in the first place
But..
Learn more models, learn more tools
9. What if we as a testing community collectively have limited mental models about automation
and are consequently feeding the same limited mental models back to testers like Jim
The question
10. Automation workshops/talks in
conferences
WebDriver/Seleni
um, 17
Watir, 1
API, 2
Big Data, 2
Unit Testing, 2
BDD, 5
Monitoring, 2
Security Testing, 1
WebDriver/Selenium
Watir
API
Big Data
Unit Testing
BDD
Monitoring
Security Testing
Talks and workshops that explicitly
talk about an automation tool
5 Popular conferences 2012 – 2015
14. Where are the workshops or requirements for skills in:
Monitoring
Deployment
Test data population
Configuration Management
Parsing data
API Testing
Unit testing
15. So what could we do?
Look further afield to learn new tools Tinker around with other tools
Personal
Community
Demand more diversity in automation training
When writing job roles focus more on the problems that need solving
Think more about the problem you want to solve, is your current model enough?
For those glass half full people out there this isn’t a talk about why WebDriver is good
For those glass half empty people it isn’t a talk about why WebDriver is bad
This is a talk about Models, Skillsets and a guy called Jim
To begin with this was going to be my talk
It was my intention in this talk to make some remarks about automation and how we can do much more than simply automate checks
And in doing so I was going to quote from this talk… <Change talk>
Iain’s talk presents how Testers should have multiple mental models about how you could solve a problem with automation. Or as he puts it ‘Look at the world through a different pair of lenses every time you have a problem’. The more mental models you have and the ease in which you can switch between these models can determine how successful your testing might be.
But as I revisited the talk there was a part in which he talked about how ‘Tools shape how you test’. I began to form a questions about our testing community
Let me introduce my question with an my interpretation of the above quote <change slide>
He could have created a faster more stable test that would have done a better job
He has a limited amount of mental models because he only knows how to use one tool
Having knowledge of more tools and models could mean Jim could make better choices
How does he learn about tools that are available to him or even realise he could benefit from learning them
He would look at what training there is out there and what other testers are doing to solve similar problems
Are conferences ignoring other workshops for other tools?
I don’t think so
I believe this is a symptom of supply and demand
All the items listed on the right appear in 2% or less of the job roles
Why is WebDriver skill and training so much more prevalent than other tools?
Are we fixated with the thinking that all our automation problems can be solved through the automating UI instead others ways like ‘Automator Jim
Based on the evidence in the previous slides it appears we have a very distorted view of what is important and what is not when it comes to automating and if we continue to follow the same path we will still have testers like ‘Automator Jim’ making the same mistakes again and again
