Hearing and talking about test automation is one thing. Doing it yourself however proves to be an interesting venture that you should experience. Now, you will get that chance. We will pair you up behind machines with an application under test, and the agile automated testing tool to work with. You can then develop your tests and see if you get them automated. You will have two 45 minute sessions to learn and practice. You will follow the keyword-driven, Action Based Testing method to do it. Hans Buwalda and Tuan Truong will lead the workshop; introduce the method and the cases to be tested. You will receive the training and coaching while doing the work.

Main Message:

• Introduction to Action Based Testing
• Working with action keywords
• Creating automated test cases
• Running the tests with automation
• Maintaining the tests
• Managing Software Testing through Dashboard
• Automation for Continuous Integration

Having quality tests and a significant degree of automation for them, timely, stable, and long-term maintainable, can be a major benefit for any organization developing software. It will help shorten time-to-market and improve quality-to-market, and make software development manageable. This class will not focus on technical matters or testing best practices, but on assembling the team, and what role having the right roles and skills can play in testing and automation success, either self-contained or as part of a larger agile organization. Hans will describe what he considers the "dream team", not just the composition, but also how it could fit in and interact with its environment, and what can be done to improve further. Like in many areas other than testing, having the right teams constitutes a key factor for success.

Main Message:

• Make the best team, or make the best from an existing team
• Not everybody needs to be good at everything
• Main roles: analysis, design, automate, but also manage work, and interact with stake holders
• Aim at good aggressive tests, boring means bad
• Identify stake-holders, assign team members as point of contact
• Various ways lead to Rome: hiring, training, coaching, self-studying, special interest groups, etc

Session: How to do Testing and Test Automation for Complex Software in Agile Development

Even though agile system development is becoming a very common practice, automated testing in agile projects is still considered a challenge, in particular for functional testing. In particular for large and complex systems it is hard to achieve a high degree of automation that is both timely available in the projects iterations, and maintainable and re-usable in the long term. In this class, Hans Buwalda will how the principles of Action Based Testing, in itself an agile approach, can be best applied to agile projects, and how it can accommodate even the largest and most complex projects. See how modularized test design, rather than technical prowess, plays a crucial role, and how test development and automation would best fit in an agile project iteration.

Main Message:

• Tests are products, treat them as such
• Test design driving successful automation
• Test modules as a way to organize tests
• Clear and differentiated scope for test modules
• Using actions for accessible and maintainable automated tests
• Scope of test module drives what actions to use
• Use "variations" to accommodate versions and configurations