The acceleration of our digital transformation challenged us on our capability to deliver fast and reliable software. Our e-commerce platform being at the center of our UX, delivering on a weeks basis was not acceptable. We will share the journey and learnings leading us to deliver with confidence on a daily basis our platform with 6000+ functional and automated tests.

What looks like a simple choice in a drop down list, it can turn into a nightmare. Integrating an external mapping service can unintentionally make many of your users unhappy. How can we test websites and apps in disputed territories or partially recognized state?

In this topic Nikolay is going to share how to build an automation framework which can be used by everyone. Main technologies behind it are java / cucumber / testNG. Testcon participants will see main principles building an automation framework in a way any QA will be able to learn / use and contribute. On top of that any non technical person will be able to consume and write UI tests. 

As software testers, we accept that each new role will require us to learn new technologies and skills. We also know that we often feel the need (or are told of the need) to provide value to the project quickly. Both of these competing expectations are normal to a certain degree. When Christian joined a new project about testing an API against a European Union standard for payment services, he had to do both to an extreme that he never experienced before.

The title may sound trivial or even like a cliche. But in today’s world, whether it is environment or work constant change is a fact. And those changes can be difficult to introduce and manage. So, how to embrace and control them? Not without a reason we have something called Change Management, the whole field dedicated to prepare, support and help with changes.

Have you ever been in one of the following situations while creating and using automated web tests?
– many scripting maintenances by changing data or elements on the front end
– flaky tests due to the waiting strategy or timings
– difficulty in having a coding pattern
– delay in running the tests, slowing the execution of your pipeline, resulting in a slow feedback

Why IMO QA automation should die as a profession in the future? Dead patterns that are often used by QAs and how to improve test codebase. In short: we will talk about the professional growth of the QA engineer from the perspective of the developer. And is it possible to work together and enjoy this work?

The need for this presentation was born from all the hate for Gherkin, and how it is treated in the automation industry. Nikolaj will pay a small tribute to that framework and its help in test automation rolling out by both more testers jumping on board and client’s education on what is test automation and how it works. Nikolaj is not an advocate for gherkin and in most of the case he would choose non-Gherkin framework, but when you end up with one there are ways to make it work. 

As in the movie HomeAlone, it seems that Dev and Ops have gone on a journey and forgot to take testing/QA with them. We hear big companies tell stories that they have no more testers, all testing is done in production, everything is fully automated by dev, etc. The actual truth lies somewhere in between these statements!

Prometheus, one of the ancient titans of Greece, once stole the fire from the Gods and taught people how to use it. Likewise, in this talk, Finn will describe how you as QA-Titans can teach Quality to designers and stakeholders and pair with developers and business. He will also share the secret how to keep quality in everyone’s mind on the way from idea to production for every individual story as well as the entire product.

Developers are testing. This is a fact today. And it’s a good thing. Actually, it’s an amazing thing, as experience has shown that the closer the tests are to the code, the better they are. In this talk I will explain why shifting-left is a good strategy, I will discuss the best practices in frontend and backend development, including the types of tests that give value (unit, component, integration, e2e) in both frontend and backend development, and finally show how developer testing has affected the development and testing workflows in companies that have shifted left.

Are you afraid of testing in production? Do you test in production? Do you use real data? By definition testing in production is hard. This talk puts together Jorge`s experience testing in production a large scale system that affects millions of users. Experience, ideas, limits, roadblocks, tips and more. 

Effective test automation is a key factor in achieving continuous integration, and ultimately, success with a DevOps development approach. However, many organizations continue to point to testing as a bottleneck in their pipeline. The culprit is often the inability to incorporate stable automation in their testing practices. They fall victim to common traps including misunderstanding what test automation is, automating the wrong tests, focusing on UI level automation and failing to provide a stable execution environment. 

Doing testing well requires having enough people with the right skills and knowledge. Great testers have always needed to be T-shaped people with strong testing skills and an ability to cross over into other IT roles and to understand “the business”. Phil always stressed that testing needs not only good hard skills, but also soft skills because the work deals with finding and reporting human mistakes. But in the last few years, particularly with the now prevalent adoption of Agile and DevOps, the challenges facing software testers are growing with an increasing need to be able to apply knowledge of system architecture, coding and how to use a number of tools to help them to do their job both quickly and thoroughly. At the same it seems to be getting harder to get sufficient talent into IT as a whole, never mind into software testing. 

Isn’t is amazing. Stakeholders drop software on our desk and expect us to test it with no requirements, no design and no product knowledge whatsoever. About the only clear thing is the absurd and unrealistic deadline. We are expected to bend over backward, spread magic pixie dust and heroically test quality into a product we never heard of before. But testing in the dark is not impossible – and as Rob Sabourin shows it can even be a very valuable and fun experience.

Despite its name, DevTools isn’t just a tool for people who write code. DevTools contains many tools which can help you in your day to day testing of web applications. Whether you want to know how to put client validation to the test, gain a better understanding of how to identify and debug errors or just simply run audits on your web applications, then this session is for you.

Middleware like databases or messages brokers are mission critical by design as they are necessary to allow applications to work and work together. Outages of such components have severe impacts on the end user experience and therefore can negatively impact revenue and image of the company running the application that uses these components. The talk aims to give a holistic insights into the reliability assurance process behind highly scalable, enterprise grade, and mission critical middleware.

Companies around the world want to accelerate software delivery by implementing or optimizing their DevOps pipeline. Teams focus on things like code pipelines, CI/CD, and deploying to Docker containers, but they often overlook the critical nature of automated testing. Without true Continuous Testing, no amount of DevOps effort can get quality software released any faster.

With a plethora of technologies and disciplines flooding the Testing/Test Automation segment in the past 5 years aimed at improving application quality, are organizations setting up test automation using these tools to derive the expected benefits?

“The Swag of Performance Testing” shows 4 easy ways to create test suites with different open source tools. From the OpenAPI interface we will create a performance suite into Postman then Jmeter and finally Blazemeter, fully automated and fully functional.

You’ve got thousands of automated tests running, multiple test and coverage reports and logs – but you can’t see the forest from the trees. The problem is you don’t know: is it safe to release? With refined, specific metrics, you can define reports (or dashboard) that tell you the real quality of the product. You can then decide what to do about it.

What value do we provide as testers? The short answer is that testing has no value in itself, testing is a service we provide to our teams so that our company can deliver value-adding products or services. In this talk, Joel will briefly review the forces pushing forward the changes in the way we create and deliver products today. He will introduce (for those who have not heard about them before) the Modern Testing Principles. And he will review them to understand their challenges and breakthroughs! 

Agile software development is growing in popularity and the testing team in the agile projects had to keep in pace with development progress. Agile testing tools vary from project management tools to automated testing tools.

This presentation is designed to discuss the fundamental philosophies of agile methodologies, Automation Testing and Testing Nonstop.

AI and ML are new technologies that will be applied at a rapid pace. The impact of this on testing will be large. For a large part, well-known approaches will still be sustainable. Organizations as well as testers will also have to adjust to keep up with the times. Sometimes it is hard to keep up and still need to start with testing. The 2 approaches helps to provide initial insights.

Test design is not an easy task if you want to find tricky bugs without creating an enormous number of test cases.

In the presentation, first Istvan classifies the defects in a new way. The simplest case is when a single data parameter triggers a failure whenever a program point has been reached along any program path from the data entry point. It can occur, however, that the failure only happens if more parameters have specific values in common. If the number of parameters causing the failure together is two, then the bug is a second-order bug, etc.

After presenting his session “Eight Ways to Ruin Your 1-on-1s” at Stareast and SQuADCon Denver in 2019, attendees told Jason one particular area of discussion needed more attention: feedback. This session will be the session everyone knows they should attend but would like to avoid! Providing feedback is a necessary skill for individuals, teams, and organizations to grow, yet studies suggest 69% of managers are uncomfortable communicating with their employees and 37% of business leaders are afraid to give performance feedback. Although these numbers only address managers, we all need to show leadership by providing feedback to those around us in all directions.

We’re known for breaking things and testing the limits, and patience, of our team and our systems. We advocate for quality in all things and we advocate for the end user. But, none of us actually think about how our varied backgrounds influence what we do and how we test. In this session we’ll explore how our previous (and current) experiences subconsciously affect our testing and how to bring those experiences to the forefront in order to be better testers all around.

Unit testing is fine, but without proper integration testing, especially if you work with external resources like databases and other services, you might not know how your application will actually behave once it has been deployed to the real production environment.

Before Docker, configuring the environment for integration testing was painful – people were using fake database implementations, mocking servers, usually it was not cross-platform as well. However, thanks to Docker, now we can quickly prepare the environment for our tests.

Testing a well known software like Elasticsearch is not too different to any other software. In this session we will peak into the different testing strategies for unit and integration tests including randomized testing, how we leverage gradle, how we do packaging tests, how we test the REST layer, what our CI infrastructure and tooling around that looks like and finally what happens in order to release Elasticsearch and other products of the Elastic Stack.

Software testing is becoming increasingly important because more and more products are software intensive. Cars, for example, contain Electronic Control Units (ECUs) that is networked with each other. However, software problems can delay commissioning by months, even years, because the different components are not coordinated with each other. A timely system test would help, but there is a lack of time and resources. The functionality of the software is simply too great for manual testing. So, you must automate.

The best defense against unexpected failures is to build resilient services. Testing for resiliency enables teams to discover these failures before the customer notices. In my talk I’m going to present open source tool that can be used for containers resilience testing, stress testing, and network emulation, running on a Docker host or on a Kubernetes cluster.

Bugs are great learning opportunities. So how do we make sure we learn as much as possible from the bugs we find and fix? One way is to reflect on what made the bug hard to solve, and how we could avoid this type of bug in the future. For the past 15 years Henrik has written down short descriptions of the trickiest bugs he has solved. This simple method has helped him distill patterns that have influenced how he writes, tests and debugs code.

Have you ever heard of ‘code smells’? This term expresses the situation in which a certain code characteric might indicate a much deeper problem. Things may seem okay at first sight and everything might appear to work fine, but if you dive in more deeply, it starts to smell more and more and code may even be rotten with low maintainability and bad performance as possible results, just to name a few.

Even if your system is thoroughly tested and you are sure of its quality, customer acceptance is not necessarily a formality. In theory, the customer accepts the product after the acceptance tests, which at this stage of system development should not be a problem. So much theory, in practice, things can be different. So how to make sure that your product will successfully pass the business acceptance test? 

Based on a case study of the world’s biggest justice digital transformation programme the presentation explains why highly valued SDETs are only part of the answer to the challenge of Continuous Deployment, whereas the skills of Exploratory testers are often undervalued.

After executing a project to test a cloud-based microservices platform, we experienced a lot of challenges in both of technical and social manners and tried to develop solutions to cope with them. Finally, we have wrapped them up to make a list of golden rules to successfully manage a test project. The purpose of this talk is to give insights about how a test automation project is managed.  “After executing a project to test a cloud-based microservices platform, we experienced a lot of challenges in both of technical and social manners and tried to develop solutions to cope with them.

Myths say testers should only use TestNG when looking for an assertion framework. Myths say only developers use JUnit and that this framework is only suited for unit testing. Myths say a lot of things, but they are just myths.
The truth is both of these frameworks offer a lot of useful functionality for testers, whether they are ‘QA’ testers or ‘developer’ testers. 

As a research project to see why test automation of web applications is so hard, and why our Selenium scripts seem to break so frequently, we ran an experiment to analyze the top 500 (ranked by Moz) web sites to see what patterns we would find that could be optimized by either AI or ML. Unlike other presentation technologies, web applications present a uniquely difficult challenge for automation. They are written in a plain text markup language (HTML) that follows many conventions and rules (e.g. unique IDs, use class names for styling), but browsers are so forgiving, that many of the rules are ignored since they are not enforced in any way. 

Serverless cloud applications are rapidly moving into the mainstream. They offer the advantage of lower costs, faster development, and elastic growth. In this model, teams focus on developing and deploying code on a known technology stack and runtime, with fixed interfaces for application, database, and network. But testing serverless applications brings significant challenges to testers. Because the stack is typically maintained by the cloud provider, it is updated with new versions and security patches on a regular basis. Testers have to continuously test the stack interfaces to make sure that interface integrity is maintained. Further, the serverless model usually incorporates an execution runtime engine, abstracting the running code from the rest of the platform. The database can also be abstracted away from actual data calls. While abstraction is generally a good thing, it can also hide important information during traditional testing. This presentation will explain the architectures of serverless systems and applications and look at challenges testers face with serverless applications, why those challenges exist, and how testers can overcome them. It presents a model for testing both serverless components and entire applications with the context of a serverless runtime.

If a good developer can write a bad code what is the guarantee that tester with no coding experience can write good code? Having a bigger team of testers who have their characteristic of writing code can be pretty painful when the tester will change the team or even worst leave the company. Maintenance is difficult even when the tester is still in the team since he has duplicated the same logic in a huge amount of page objects which will be almost impossible to be refactored in a very short period. Pattern Object Model helped us to gain the trust of new clients by delivering automated tests on day one on the project and regain the trust of existing clients by reducing the maintenance time.

Cloud computing has a large momentum and new cutting-edge technologies are available compared to traditional on-premises architecture. Benefits are numerous and include lower upfront costs, impressive scalability, faster setup and many more. That’s why a large number of projects are being migrated to the cloud. At the same time, a vast majority of new projects use cloud services. Even though cloud technology provides a lot of benefits, the challenge of testing these systems still exists, especially in testing business logic. Azure is a cloud computing service created by Microsoft — one of the biggest cloud providers at the moment. Milovan will share his experience in working on an Azure-based solution and in this presentation he will:
– Provide ways of monitoring what is going on in the Azure cloud
– Explain the differences between traditional and cloud testing
– Provide ways to automate cloud testing

Good software practices don’t end just because you’re building a thick client in the browser. The JavaScript community is a flourishing boutique of high-quality tools and techniques. We’ll dig into some of the more popular open-source JavaScript patterns that have emerged from the Node community. We’ll see mocha, chai, karma, and headless Chrome in action, look at some great techniques and patterns for browser development, and brush up on things that make JavaScript is a phenomenal place to work.

Creating and maintaining a mobile device lab is a high priority while developing and testing modern mobile apps. Should you build your own or use the cloud solutions, or maybe you should create a hybrid solution to use both in house and cloud solution? Sargis will share our experience of building a mobile lab.

It is becoming more and more challenging to test mobile apps on different devices, with different screen sizes, running different operating systems. During the development of a mobile app, we can easily verify and test the app on a mobile simulator or emulator. However, only simulator or emulator testing isn’t enough, we need to make sure that our app works on devices that our users carry with them in their pocket.
Creating a in house Automation Mobile Lab will be a good decision if you’re looking to do automated testing, for example with Selenium and Appium.

Automated SLO-based Testing as a Self-Service with Keptn: SLIs (Service Level Indicators) & SLOs (Service Level Objectives) are what SREs (Site Reliability Engineers) use in production to ensure changes are not impacting system’s health and availability. Successful organizations are also embracing SLIs/SLOs in their delivery pipeline and in their automated testing strategies. In this webinar, Andreas Grabner will show how you can implement Automated SLO-based Testing as a Self-Service with the open source project Keptn.