Tools
Articles
 |
Lessons Learned Switching Manual Tests to Pytest If you want to start automating your test cases, László Szegedi makes an argument for using the popular Python and Selenium combination. Here, he gives a test script you can use after every release to find any serious regression bugs in the system, to be executed automatically. Integrate it with your existing development pipeline and you get a pretty useful tool for continuous improvement. |
|
 |
A Beginner's Guide to Test Automation If you’re new to automated testing, you’re probably starting off with a lot of questions: How do I know which tests to automate? Why is automated testing useful for me and my team? How do I choose a tool or framework? This article answers a lot of those questions—and gives you some more to consider!—so you have an excellent foundation for beginning your automation endeavors. |
|
 |
Test Tooling Patterns for Solving Problems A design pattern consists of the pattern name, the problem it solves, how to implement the solution, and some consequences. There are also proven patterns like this that can be used in testing. This article lists and defines many commonly used patterns that can help you solve problems, improve code maintenance, and just make your life easier. |
|
 |
The TERMS for Test Automation Risk or Success Automation is a service to testing—a tool that may prove to be useful or turn wasteful. When approaching test automation, there are five main areas to focus on, expressed in the acronym TERMS: Tools and Technology, Execution, Requirements, Maintenance, and Security. Here are some examples of how these factors are involved in defining automation success or failures. |
Interviews
 |
Data Visualization in Test Automation: A Conversation with Greg Paskal
Video
Greg Paskal, test automation lead at Ramsey Solutions, talks about data lakes and how to effectively use data visualization. Done well, data visualization should help practitioners, managers, and stakeholders easily consume, understand, and act on the information the visual displays. |
|
 |
Mining a Data Lake to Improve Analysis of Your Test Automation Data: An Interview with Greg Paskal
Video
In this interview, Greg Paskal, a technology innovator in quality assurance, discusses a new open source tool from Elastic Stack that creates a “data lake” that can be mined to analyze the data coming from test automation on a more effective level than pass/fail. |
|
 |
Automated Security Scanning in Your Delivery Pipeline: An Interview with Matt Grasberger
Video
Matt Grasberger, a software consultant at Coveros Inc., discusses shifting left security scans that you can do quickly and easily and the open source tools that are available to utilize early in the application development process to ensure you are not introducing new vulnerabilities. |
|
 |
Embedding Performance Engineering into CI/CD: An Interview with Anj Dubey
Video
In this interview, Anj Dubey, director of performance engineering for McGraw-Hill Education, discusses the need to shift left and embed your performance engineering into your CI/CD pipeline in order to ensure that every line of code is going to meet your performance requirements. |
Better Software Magazine Articles
 |
The Amazing Benefits of Integrated ALM Tools For years, developers have struggled with using individual lifecycle management tools, but no longer! Joe Farah walks you through a history and benefits of an integration of ALM tools that every team should seriously consider. |
|
|
Why NoSQL Matters and What Configuration Management Experts Need to Know About It NoSQL is a new approach to data storage that addresses many problems associated with relational databases. Many highly popular websites—including Facebook, Netflix, and Digg—are using NoSQL to crunch large volumes of data. Eugene Dvorkin gives us insight into why NoSQL is important and what CM experts need to know about it. |
||
|
Practical Security Testing for Web Applications It seems like every week the press has yet another story about security breaches or stolen data at some of the world’s largest companies or government agencies. Sometimes the responsibility for ensuring thorough security resides with an IT security group, and other times it gets outsourced altogether. The responsibility seldom falls to testing teams. However, this is changing. Having trained and experienced testers hunt for security bugs will make web applications safer from hackers and will further protect consumers, corporate assets, and brands.. Scott Aziz offers some practical techniques that will help you get started. |
||
|
Traditional Test Engineering, Your Days Are Numbered In the first installment of this article, Dr. James Whittaker discussed turning testing on its head—to revitalize and improve the value of late-stage testing. James also discussed ideas behind empowering your dogfooders, testers, and the crowd to significantly and efficiently improve software quality. In part two, Jason Arbon discusses the research and engineering experimentation behind realizing these ideas into new tools and processes. |
Conference Presentations
 |
Dig In: Get Familiar with the Code to Be a Better Tester
Slideshow
Maybe you’ve been testing the same application for a while and your rate of finding new bugs has slowed. Or you’re trying to find more ways to figure out what your devs are doing day to day. You have the tools at your disposal—you just need to dig in! Hilary Weaver-Robb will share tools and techniques you can use to take your testing to the next level. See everything the developers are changing, and learn how you can find the most vulnerable parts of the code. These strategies can help you focus your testing and track down those pesky bugs! Take away a better understanding of tools to conduct static analysis on the code, and use these results to find potential bugs. You'll discover ways to use commit logs to figure out what’s being changed and understand why it’s helpful to dig into the code of the application under test. |
Hilary Weaver-Robb
|
 |
Excuse-Free Testing: An Open Source Tool for Simpler CI Integration
Slideshow
The goal of continuous testing is to find defects earlier in the development lifecycle and release software faster to the market. This can be achieved by integrating open source functional and performance testing tools in the early stages of your software delivery lifecycle. Klaus Neuhold will explain how to integrate the open source test automation framework Taurus, and other tools such as JMeter and Selenium, as a CI step in Jenkins pipelines, so that these tools can be triggered as part of everyday code commits or builds. Taurus can run a large variety of tests and has reporting features that ensure agile teams dodge defects and nasty surprises before the software is released. It's a sophisticated yet easy-to-use framework that requires no programming skills, and test scenarios can be described in a natural-language DSL and triggered from any command-line enabled tools. |
Klaus Neuhold
|
 |
The Dell EMC Journey in the Age of Smart Assistants
Slideshow
Dell EMC is driving to optimize and reimagine their testing practices with the application of data-driven smart assistants, powered by analytics and machine learning. At a macro level, Geoff Meyer will highlight the opportunities across the product engineering and testing landscapes that are ripe for the application of analytics and AI. Key ingredients in moving toward solutions that matter are the identification of organization-specific pain points, their prioritization, and the availability and cleanliness of essential data. Geoff will share the process of experimentation, staffing, and implementation that his team approached these new opportunities with, and then delve into the smart assistants they’ve created to automate deep-thinking, cognitive-based testing tasks. |
Geoff Meyer
|
 |
Where Does Data Come From?
Slideshow
With all the tools available on the market, it can be overwhelming to determine which ones might meet your needs and which ones will work best in your environment to create a high-performing team. Join Jennifer Bonine as she explains the relationship of the DevOps cycle, your environment, and how a hub-and-spoke model can link all your different data sets and tools together. Jennifer will identify opportunities for applying test data analytics across the engineering and test landscape, ranging from high-value test cases to dynamically generated regression test suites. She will review ways to collaborate and show results in a way that clearly demonstrates progress and how to present a visual dashboard to your leadership and stakeholders in the organization. |
Jennifer Bonine
|
Recommended Web Seminars
Featured Resources
Visit Our Other Communities
StickyMinds is a TechWell community.
Through conferences, training, consulting, and online resources, TechWell helps you develop and deliver great software every day.