Due to the recent news of the passing of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, Automation in Testing Manchester has changed from three to two days, starting on the 20th of September, at The Lowry Theatre, Pier Eight Room, until the 21st of September.
Automation is everywhere, its popularity and uptake have rocketed in recent years and it’s showing little sign of slowing down. So in order to be successful with automation, all you need to know is how to code, right? No. While knowing how to code is a great tool in your toolbelt, there is far more to automation than writing code. Beyond learning to code you need to be able to determine:
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What tests you should create
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What data your tests require
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What layer in your application you should write them at
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What language or framework to use
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If your testability is good enough
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If it’s helping you solve your testing problems
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What value you are getting from automation
Answering those questions is significantly harder than writing the code. Yet our industry is pushing people straight into code and bypassing the theory. Automation in Testing aims to help you answer those questions by focusing on not just creating automation, but working out opportunities to use automation as well as advocating for good practices and uses of automation in your team. This is achieved through two days of training that combines blended learning techniques to help you get the most out of our training. Throughout the course you’ll take part in:
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Engaging classroom activities that have you roleplaying as specialists in automation, tasked with automating a modern web application
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Self-guided activities that will have you exploring a wide range of automation techniques, with support from your instructors
Throughout the course, Richard and Mark offer their expert knowledge and share techniques and theories they use to succeed with automation whilst offering you the opportunity to explore the tools and ideas you want to learn.
What Happened
Select a session to learn more about it.
Part One
What
TrainingDescription
Part one begins with an introduction to the Automation in Testing mindset and then hits the ground running by kicking off the classroom roleplay. The start of the roleplay focuses on analysing our product, project and processes and visualising what we’ve learnt to inform us on what opportunities exist for automation. You’ll then be given activities to help you solidify your skills by surveying and modelling your own contexts for automation opportunities.
Takeaways
- Use the principles of Automation in Testing as a guide when working with automation
- Survey a given context to better understand its suitability for the use of automation
- Design a model of their product to inform them of how and where automation can be carried out
Prerequisites
Please bring a laptop, OS X, Linux or Windows with all the prerequisites installed that will be sent to you.
Speakers
Part Two
What
TrainingDescription
Part two continues our focus on automated checking by using the new visualised knowledge of our contexts to help us plan what we want automated checks we want to create, and then build them. We are going to explore what it takes to design and implement reliable focused automated checks. We’ll do this at many interfaces of the applications.
Takeaways
- Use visual task analysis to break down complex system behaviour to make it easier to identify automation opportunities
- Differentiate testing from automated checking and how the differences inform their automation strategies
- Judge what automated checks to build using system knowledge and risk analysis
- Design and build valuable automated checks
- Analyse automated checks to determine their intent and quality
Prerequisites
Please bring a laptop, OS X, Linux or Windows with all the prerequisites installed that will be sent to you.
Speakers
Part Three
What
TrainingDescription
Part three takes a step away from automated checking to explore an area of automation in testing that is often ignored. Building tools to support testing activities. Through a series of hands-on activities and challenges, you will learn how to speed up your testing and get deeper into your applications through a range of different tools. To conclude the course we'll reflect on what we’ve learnt throughout the course and set goals for the future.
Takeaways
- Experiment with different tools that can be used to support testing
- Use automated tools to support testing activities
Prerequisites
Please bring a laptop, OS X, Linux or Windows with all the prerequisites installed that will be sent to you.
Speakers
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need to be already currently working in automation to attend this course?
This course caters for every level of experience of working in an automation context. If you do work with automation already, we believe this course will provide you with numerous new ways to think and talk about automation, allowing you to maximise your skills in the workplace.
If you don’t, this course will show you that the majority of skill in automation is about risk identification, strategy and test design, and you can add a lot of value to automation efforts within testing. We've also included some online content to set the foundation for the class, allowing us to hit the ground running with some example scenarios. This will be sent to you before the class starts and enable you to:
- Describe and explain some key concepts/terminology associated with programming
- Interpret and explain real code examples
- Design pseudocode for a potential automated test
- Develop a basic understanding of programming languages relevant to the AiT course
- Explain the basic functionality of a test framework
This course material will allow us to maximise our face to face time together.
What will I need to bring to the event?
For this event you will need:
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A PC running, OS X, Linux or Windows
The rest of the prerequisite tools to install will be sent to you before the training. Mark and Richard also offer support with setup if you get stuck.
I don’t work in the webspace, should I attend?
The majority of the tooling we will use and demo is web-based, however, AiT is a mindset, so we believe you will benefit from attending the class and learning a theory to apply to any product/language.
I’m a manager who is interested in strategy but not programming, should I attend?
Yes, one of the core drivers to educate others in identifying and strategizing problems before automating them. We will offer techniques and teach you skills to become better at analysing your context and using that information to build a plan towards successful automation.
What languages and tools will we be using?
The current setup is using Java and JS. We can customize depending on needs for private classes. Importantly though, we focus more on the thinking then the implementation, so while we’ll be reading and writing code, the languages are just a vehicle for the context of the class.