TestBash Autumn 2023 will be our second and last TestBash of the year: a 2-day online software testing conference covering a wide variety of testing topics.
On day one, we will focus on a wide variety of testing topics and on day two we will niche down to focus on the tools and automation side of testing.
If you are a Pro Member, this conference is included in your membership and if you're not, you can either go Pro or purchase a ticket.
What Happened
Select a session to learn more about it.
How Collaborating with the Wider Business Helps with Testing
What
Talk + Q&ATopics
Description
- Insight into what customers are saying, thinking, and asking about the product
- A view on what’s important to users in terms of use cases for test generation and rationalising what to focus on
Learning Outcomes
- Learn why getting close to what our customers (actual and prospective) are doing contributes to testing
- The importance of building relationships outside of the engineering arena can contribute to quality
- How setting up demo sessions, sharing content etc can assist
Speaker
Testing Autonomous Beasts: With Great Value Comes Great Responsibility
What
Talk + Q&ATopics
Description
Learning Outcomes
- How unique challenges and high risks in robotics make software testing even more valuable
- How modern exploratory testing helps to close the crucial quality gaps in unpredictable environments
Speaker
Quality + Data Engineering: How to Thrive
What
Talk + Q&ATopics
Description
As a Principal Data Engineer in Test (PDET), my focus goes beyond conventional quality practices. In this talk, I will share my personal journey of embracing this unique role and the challenges it entails. The discussion will delve into the critical aspect of ensuring data quality and highlight the distinct considerations that data engineers need to address.
Through this presentation, attendees will gain valuable insights into the practical experiences and lessons learned from working in the intersection of quality and data engineering. By exploring the nuances of this space, we will uncover the key factors that contribute to successful data engineering projects. Join me as we navigate world of quality and data engineering, and discover how to thrive in this dynamic environment.
Learning Outcomes
- What Data Quality means, and why it’s important to the business as a whole
- How Data Quality can be measured and how this differs from the standard testing practices
- How someone new to the Data Engineering space can make an impact in terms of quality
Speaker
Snapshots Through Time - How We Evolved Screenshot Testing at Our Company
What
Talk + Q&ATopics
Description
Learning Outcomes
- The gaps that screenshot testing covers that other types of testing can't
- The factors that can make these tests flakey or brittle, and how to mitigate or eliminate them
- How to make life easy when the screenshots have to be updated for intentional changes
Speaker
Alyssa Burlton
Head of Engineering Effectiveness25+ Years Career in Software Testing with Dave Harrison
What
Fireside ChatDescription
We will be introducing a TestBash-first: the Fireside Chats!
The Fireside Chats are designed to be an engaging one-to-one conversation between a host and a speaker, whose opinions, ideas and stories will provide value to the community. A more broad conversation about life experiences and insights.
And what better way to start than to have our fantastic host Gwen Diagram invite on screen for a chat, Dave Harrison! Dave has a 25+ years career in Software Testing and loads of stories to tell us about his experiences, we can't wait to listen to.
Dave received his first 'testing assignment' in the late 80's, and has been working in software testing since the early 1990's. Early projects in his career involved working on the first macintosh laptops and products that facilitated 'telecommuting' along with early versions of web browsers from Netscape and Microsoft. He then grew his career by pursuing leadership opportunities with Disney's e-commerce division, global travel brands, and some government contracting in healthcare technology. Dave has also been a key contributor to six successful startup companies. For the past nine years, he has led the software testing practice and an early stage quality coaching effort for one of the largest Fintechs in the world. Dave has attended TestBash conferences since 2016, giving 99 second talks and helping with onsite and online discussion groups.
Learning Outcomes
- Learn about the successes of a long career
- Things to avoid in Software Testing
- Be inspired by an industry expert
Speaker
Chaos as an Art: Fault Injection
What
Talk + Q&ATopics
Description
On the other hand will explore the fault injection tool which is xk6-disruptor, discussing features, capabilities, and integration possibilities with existing testing environments. Attendees will gain practical knowledge on how to leverage these tools to create controlled chaos and simulate realistic failure scenarios.
Learning Outcomes
- Understand how fault injection enhances system resilience and performance
- Learn various fault injection methods and when to apply them
- Familiarize yourself with tools and frameworks for conducting fault injection (k6)
- Gain insights into analyzing and interpreting fault injection results
- Explore real-world case studies highlighting the benefits of fault injection
Speaker
Driving a Culture of Quality
What
DiscussionDescription
During this session, we will be able to hear from three huge leaders in the influencing space. They will share their knowledge and experience of all the ways they contribute and drive a culture of quality in their workspace, in their teams or within the community.
Ben Dowen - Has had the great honour of working with a variety of different teams, and different structures over the past 11+ years. From large enterprises with central testing teams to small consultancies with only a small handful of testers, Ben had the opportunity to influence quality in different ways. Ben truly believes that building great software is a team sport, and influencing quality takes a blend of technical skill and domain knowledge, applied using a combination of advocacy and knowledge sharing.
Caleb Crandall - Has over 11 years of experience in writing and testing high-quality software for medical devices. Caleb has been fortunate to join a software team that already had a strong culture of quality, but he helps influence and maintain that culture through participation in requirement, design, and code reviews; celebrating finding bugs (every bug they find and fix before shipping is a bug that doesn't impact their customers' experience!); and being a strong advocate for "slow is smooth, smooth is fast" development and testing practices. That is, doing the things they know they need to do to reduce risk and increase confidence in the robustness of each increment of work they deliver, even under pressure.
Parveen Khan - Is a solo tester within her company. Being a solo tester meant that Parveen has always been trying to coach/mentor devs to be quality champions and mostly successfully, has been able to build a whole team quality approach. This has helped her in being able to focus on driving quality initiatives and not just be there to test the features even though she's the only tester on the team. This is also very much aligned to making use of everyone's influencing skills and leading without a title (lead title) or authority to drive changes within the team.
Speakers
How to Advocate for Accessibility Testing and Implementing It on Your Teams
What
Talk + Q&ADescription
As testers, we are always empathizing with our users, to simulate their actions or their point of view, so we can test the site from their perspective. How many of you have considered testing from the point of view of someone with a disability? Does your team account for accessibility?
It’s ok if your answers to the questions above are “Oh no, I haven’t” or “Oh wow, I didn’t think about that”.
Don’t worry, that is why I am here to help everyone get in the mindset of testing for accessibility as well. And most importantly, advocating for it on your teams, by sharing the benefits.
I will share from my personal experience, how I got my team to start thinking about accessibility. So we’ve now advocated for accessibility on our teams, you may be wondering “But how do I test for accessibility?”. This is usually the question that follows after advocating for accessibility on your teams.
This is where I’ll teach you how to create accessibility personas. I will also share my accessibility testing checklists; which outlines the key areas to test for. I will even bring it a step further to outline ways in which you can also include accessibility testing in your automation suites.
If you’ve never considered accessibility before or you didn’t know the first step for testing accessibility, you’ll learn how to do it from this talk. I aim to inspire and advocate for more inclusive applications.
Learning Outcomes
- Convey the importance of having an inclusive application
- Illustrate the importance of testing for accessibility on your team
- Learn how to get your team to start thinking about accessibility
- Use accessibility checklist to improve your testing
- Identify ways in which you can automate tests for accessibility
Speaker
Ask Me Anything: Test Strategies with Butch Mayhew
What
Ask Me AnythingTopics
Description
We have the pleasure of having the one and only, Butch Mayhew for this Ask Me Anything session about Test Strategies!
Butch Mayhew enjoys learning new things and inspiring others. He has worked for the same company for eight years (across many different projects both individual contributor roles and management) and now works at a startup where he manages the Quality team, SRE (Reliability team) and recently, the Data Team. Living out the imposter syndrome every day :)
Speaker
99-Second Talks - Day One
What
99 Second TalksTopics
Description
It wouldn't be a TestBash without our famous 99-Second Talks!
The 99-Second Talks are the attendee's stage, an opportunity for you to come on stage and talk for, that's right, 99 seconds.
You can talk about anything, a testing topic you want to share, a personal experience, or an idea sparked by all the fantastic talks you've just listened to... the stage is yours, for 99-Seconds!
This is also a great way to get started with your public speaking.
Our stage mom Tristan Lombard, will introduce you on stage and start the clock. As soon as the time's up, a noise will be heard and that's it: time's up!
All talks will be added to our website and you will be featured as a speaker.
Prerequisites
You will need to give your web browser permission to allow your camera and microphone. Make sure these are enabled before you go on screen.
How Admiral Group Automates
What
Talk + Q&ADescription
At Admiral Group Plc we support our testing efforts with automation and are always seeking more ways to make our testing more efficient and effective. We've succeeded in many ways already and are hoping to continue that journey.
When we joined the company a few years ago, we faced numerous challenges benefiting from automation. We had no automated visual testing in place throughout the entire organisation. This resulted is lack of visual coverage across all applications, higher visual defect leakage and an excessive amount of time taken to manually test visual changes. We've overcome them now and are achieving great results from our automation. We're benefitting from being able to eventually speed up the time to production, improved customer experience by shifting left with bug catching and better engineering experience by diversifying their knowledge portfolio.
In this talk, we are going to share more details on those challenges and the approaches and tools we use to overcome them. I'll also share the current challenges we're facing and our future plans to solve them. At first glance, the technical and strategic implementation for Percy appears quite straightforward for a Web application. We've undergone a rigorous iterative process to devise a setup that caters to 10 teams simultaneously working on the same web application. Our risk-first approach to coverage, meticulous evaluation of pros and cons, and revisiting the process months later while considering contractual limitations demonstrate our thoroughness.
Throughout our journey, we've encountered numerous blockers that we not only overcame but also provided valuable feedback to Percy, contributing to their solution's enhancement for enterprises. Developing our own release strategy, including a well-thought-out branching approach and effective use of the approval system and dashboard, showcases our keen understanding of project management. Successfully integrating Percy with our End-to-End Playwright framework and we were the first enterprise to do so! With that we have also integrated Percy with our CI/CD pipeline in Jenkins and Azure Software Delivery Life Cycle which was a significant challenge, demonstrating our expertise in leveraging cloud technologies. Despite facing tough periods, we persevered and are incredibly proud of our accomplishments. We are eager to share our valuable insights and pitfalls to avoid with others to facilitate their success. While we've made remarkable progress, there are still a couple of items on our roadmap where we'd appreciate involving others to enhance our collective efforts further and raise awareness.
The Why: Visual automated testing has emerged as a pivotal component of modern Quality Engineering in organisations. In light of this paradigm shift, it would be prudent to engage in thoughtful discussions with leaders who possess a wealth of experience in navigating the intricate landscape of tool evaluation, conducting proof of concepts, and orchestrating successful implementations. We are also able to share the real benefits we have experienced by incorporating Percy in our testing workflows some of them are:
- Less time spent on verifying the expected behaviour and more time for valuable exploratory testing!
- Shift left in finding bugs as we’re able to utilise Percy at each stage of the Software Delivery Life Cycle resulting in increased confidence in our releases
- Improved morale in teams as teams have the opportunity to use a new tool and expand their skillset
Learning Outcomes
- A blueprint for a real strategy actively used within a large enterprise based on feedback from engineers and stakeholders. This will also involve a technical walkthrough of the implementation including a demonstration of a test run
- Not only do we aim to enhance your comprehension of the subject matter but also empower you to make well-informed decisions for your organisation's needs and challenges
- Good understanding of the challenges you may face, what metrics we are using to track our progress and how to tackle them efficiently
Speakers
How Sedin Technologies Automates
What
Talk + Q&ADescription
At Sedin Technologies we support our testing efforts with automation and are always seeking more ways to make our testing more efficient and effective. We've succeeded in many ways already and are hoping to continue that journey.
When I joined the company in 2022, we faced numerous challenges benefiting from automation. We understood that present test management tools are built on the Arrange-Act-Assert premise which is not how typically End-to-end or UI-driven testing is done in actual, hence writing Automated tests was not analogous to doing actual testing when human does it. We've overcome them now and are achieving great results from our automation by ditching the primary premise of testing based on Arrange-Act-Assert and resorting to State-based automation.
We wrote an open-source Test Engine for doing so which figures out Test steps on its own based on State Dependency Graph (we needed to write an algorithm for this). We're benefitting from this way of writing tests as it shifts the focus of testing from procedures to desired outcomes irrespective of how preconditions are achieved.
In this talk, I'm going to share more details on those challenges and the approaches and tools we use to overcome them. I'll also share the current challenges we're facing and our future plans to solve them.
Speaker
How DVLA Automates
What
Talk + Q&ADescription
When we started our SDET programme in 2018, we had no automation testing at the DVLA. We were beginning our transformation programme and knew we needed enterprise-wide changes to the way we were building and shipping software and our SDETs, and the automation they build, proved to be fundamental in allowing us to release software safely and quickly.
We have lots of very different products. These range from the services used by the public to access and transact with their information, products used by the motoring industry, and those used by other government departments. All of these must comply with legislation and often has immovable deadlines. We’ve grown our SDET capability into a fundamental part of how we construct our software. We’ve taken software engineers and testers and learned from each other to build a group who can confidently set our testing standards and make sure they are conformed to. We have a hugely successful development programme which builds SDETs from scratch.
We value our automated test code as highly as our production code, authoring it on the same branch, in the same repo, as our production code. We have the most brilliant Community of Practice which meets each month and is overflowing with demos and ideas for all the common problems we share. We generate a huge amount of internal libraries, increasingly making these public open-source.
In this talk, we are going to share how our SDET community automates functional testing and how it meshes with our four principles of testing early and often, integrating to avoid stubs, generating test data to avoid fixtures and making each test its own island. We’ll also talk about some of the challenges we have overcome, such as building an effective community, and the improvements we are looking to make in the future, like our exploration of model-based testing.
Feature Spotlights
What
Feature SpotlightsDescription
What are Feature Spotlights?
Feature Spotlights are short, concise videos focused on highlighting a single feature of a tool or framework, but most importantly, they're framed around a problem that anyone doing testing faces in their day-to-day work.
For example: the problem could be you've been asked to do cross-browser testing. Therefore, the Feature Spotlight might highlight how you could do that with Selenium, with Cypress, with Playwright.
The problem could be that you've been asked to look for a massive log file for certain keywords or phrases.
How Guild Education Automates
What
Talk + Q&ATopics
Description
At Guild Education, we support our testing efforts with automation and are always seeking more ways to make our testing more efficient and effective. We've succeeded in many ways already and are hoping to continue that journey.
When I joined the company in 2021, we faced numerous challenges benefiting from automation. We had some siloed test automation solutions being done on each team but no guidelines on a more enterprise-wide strategy that focused on optimized and efficient solutions. We discovered that not only were we repeating tests, but that those results were not shared across multiple teams or reviewed by other quality engineers.
We've overcome them now and are achieving great results from our automation. We're benefitting from a centralized repository, but also created what we call "prime time" guidelines that both align with our software engineer counterparts and that scale. Some of those results will include deeper discussion on our bespoke "Tests as a Service" approach, meaningful metrics, and the "Leave no Trace" method.
In this talk, I'm going to share more details on those challenges and the approaches and tools we use to overcome them. I'll also share the current challenges we're facing and our future plans to solve them.
Speaker
Ask Me Anything - Artificial Intelligence in Testing
What
Ask Me AnythingDescription
During this Ask Me Anything session, we will invite Carlos Kidman on stage to answer questions from the audience about AI in Testing.
Here's what Carlos has to say about his experience in AI in Testing:
My journey into Machine Learning (AI) started 5 years ago as I wanted to learn about ML and use it to solve challenges that traditional programming could not. I was able to actually apply ML at Workfront Adobe on some of our projects that were data and automation intensive! I was doing things with Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computer Vision).
I was an Engineering Manager at Adobe leading Platform Engineering initiatives. Then I was approached by Qualiti.ai to become their Director of Engineering to build a quality and testing platform! We literally use AI for Testing 😄
I've been there for 2 years now through all of R&D and now delivering tools for devs and testers. I have spoken at conferences about AI in Testing and how to test AI systems for the past 3 years and even have a course on TAU about it!
Speaker
The "Whens" and "Whys" of Automation
What
DiscussionTopics
Description
Gwen Diagram will invite three experts in the automation field to join her on stage and share their knowledge and expertise on the 'whens' and 'whys' of automation.
Mahathee Dandibhotla - Has a vast experience in automation, including:
- Developing and maintaining an extensible Test automation framework for desktop, web applications, API
- Having an understanding of different test automation approaches (keyword-driven, Data-driven, BDD, hybrid) and technology stacks (Java, Python)
- Creating reusable open-source testing frameworks in Java targeting different areas of Test Automation
- The list goes on... join this session to find out more
Diego Molina - Is a passionate Technical Lead driving the Selenium project and overseeing initiatives as the lead of the Open Source Program Office at Sauce Labs. Diego is also an avid Software Engineer with a deep love for testing. He's goal is to improve the testing landscape by crafting tools and robust testing infrastructure that empower individuals and organizations to test smarter and simpler
Lauren Borodajko - Has been working with and around automation since 2018. With many organisations moving to continuous deployment strategies, automation testing has become more critical than ever. As with anything, what you put in really matters, which means figuring out the right strategy for automated testing. Lauren hardly writes any tests these days. Instead, she supports development teams by guiding them down their testing journey, strategising and removing risk as they move forward. Over the years, Lauren has used various tools and frameworks, which led her to conclude that anyone can learn how to use tools, and it is the strategy where the quality mind thrives.
Speakers
Feature Spotlights
What
Feature SpotlightsDescription
What are Feature Spotlights?
Feature Spotlights are short, concise videos focused on highlighting a single feature of a tool or framework, but most importantly, they're framed around a problem that anyone doing testing faces in their day-to-day work.
For example: the problem could be you've been asked to do cross-browser testing. Therefore, the Feature Spotlight might highlight how you could do that with Selenium, with Cypress, with Playwright.
The problem could be that you've been asked to look for a massive log file for certain keywords or phrases.
99-Second Talks - Day Two
What
99 Second TalksTopics
Description
It wouldn't be a TestBash without our famous 99-Second Talks!
The 99-Second Talks are the attendee's stage, an opportunity for you to come on stage and talk for, that's right, 99 seconds.
You can talk about anything, a testing topic you want to share, a personal experience, or an idea sparked by all the fantastic talks you've just listened to... the stage is yours, for 99-Seconds!
This is also a great way to get started with your public speaking.
Gwen Diagram, will introduce you on stage and start the clock. As soon as the time's up, a noise will be heard and that's it: time's up!
All talks will be added to our website and you will be featured as a speaker
TestBash Autumn 2023 News
Frequently Asked Questions
How can I attend?
TestBash Autumn 2023 as well as all online TestBashes are included in Pro membership which makes it by far the most affordable way to attend. Pro MoT is £249.99 per year with discounts for teams and a monthly option for individual memberships.
Alternatively, you can buy a ticket just for the event for £99 - these are now available.
Are there any discounts for group bookings?
Yes there are, if you purchase 5 or more tickets you will automatically be given a discount:
- 1 to 4 tickets - £99 each
- 5 to 9 tickets - £89 each
- 10+ tickets - £79 each
I don't want to attend both days, can I buy a ticket for one day only?
No, the tickets will give you access to both days and cannot be sold separately.
Can I sponsor TestBash Autumn?
All Sponsorship opportunities are now closed.
I can't attend both days, will the event be recorded?
Yes, all live sessions and talks will be recorded and made available to all Pro Members and ticket holders post-event. As some editing needs to be done, the live sessions might take up to 2 weeks post-event to be made available, so please bear with us.
Where is the conference hosted?
TestBash Autumn 2023 will be hosted on RingCentral (previously Hopin), an excellent platform for events like this. You'll need to create a RingCentral account to access the event.
How do I join?
The joining details have been added to this event page:
- To view them, make sure you are logged in with your Pro Membership account and if not yet registered, just hit the register button.
- If you have purchased a ticket, it can take up to 2 working days for your ticket to be registered. Make sure you have entered a valid MoT account when you purchased the ticket.