TL;DR

This post is about opening keynote and open sessions that I attended.

We gathered 40 software testers, which is 20% increase! Alex Rodionov open keynote was about Testers Anxiety. Which was hit to bulls eye because every software tester experienced that.

Software testers usually first spot contradictions in the product which makes them alert and that leads to Anxiety. Alex stated how can you identify that you are lousy tester, if there are bugs in product that you missed. Very simple. I like statement that programming is analysis decomposition, and software testing is composition analysis. Testing is like art. In testing, you should never stop looking for answers.

Then Alex switched to automation in software testing. He mentioned testing pyramid and asked question do we automate too much/enough? Do we trust our automation checks? Software testing is less deterministics and involves many checks, while in automation there is only one check. Then he explained model based testing that is smarter way to do automation.

My first session was proposed by me: What is exploratory testing?  Exploratory testing is so much overused that almost become buzzword. I realized that I can not explain what is exploratory testing. So I started making wiki notes based on this excellent blog post: Exploratory testing pathway by the Marcel Gehlen. I explained to the group what I have learned so far about Exploratory testing. In that way, I expanded that understanding (by teaching others, you also learn).

Second session was about software testing tools that we use in daily jobs and issue that we had by using those tools. I learned about Web Shaper and Charles proxy. Also, Chrome dev tool throttle does not give real results. There was idea proposed by Marko that it would be much better to connect mobile devices to “shitty router”.

During the lighting talks I presented Black Box Testing Machines that could be found in this excellent blog post by Katrina the tester. Post presents various games and puzzles that are used in teaching the software testing.

Zeljko presented Scratch, Vim, and why you should not go to the conferences.

Marko presented impressive set of Jenkins jobs and created on the fly new testing environment by clicking one job!

In UX testing session, discussion whent to the direction which tools are used for user behaviour analysis.

Last session was about state of the selenium. Selenium team will no longer support Browser drivers, that is now vendor responsibility. Selenium conf and Watir Bazar are excellent conferences and if you want to write maintainable browser automatization in Ruby, you should read Cucumber and Cheese book.

In closing session we shared our AHA moment and gave away a set of Test Sphere cards!

That was it! See you next year at Testival 2017!

by

TL:DR

TL;DR means too lazy to read (I got several inquires about that).

For contet of this blog post, Nova Runda is responsible party. This post is about first day on Testival 2017, free testing conference.

We had 33 participants, of which there where 12 influenced female testers. We have never emphasized problem of gendered diversity in software testing, but with honest approach  what is software testing, we attracted that number of female software testers.

What I like about Testival is that we have returning participants, and they brought new software testers. along So, open space event approach is good direction.

We started with introductions and proposals for open event slots. And guess what, no hesitation, no need that old Testival testers to start posting their proposals:

“Zeljko, we need to arrange those proposals according to number of votes” I asked. No need for that, participants done this by them selfs, they even created new rooms!:

We are starting tomorrow at 9.00 am with Alex Rodionov opening keynote. See you there.

by

TL;DR

In this post I announce a software tester event, Testival 2017.

Testival is one day software testing gathering in unconference format:

""Typically at an unconference, the agenda is created by the attendees at the beginning of the meeting. Anyone who wants to initiate a discussion on a topic can claim a time and a space. Unconferences typically feature open discussions rather than having a single speaker at the front of the room giving a talk, although any format is permitted. This form of conference is particularly useful when the attendees generally have a high level of expertise or knowledge in the field the conference convenes to discuss."""[Wikipedia]

Why is for me this format better than regular conference?

As tester I ask a lot of questions, which is not possible at regular conference. Here is scenario: after the speaking slot, there is usually questions time slot, up to 15 minutes. This is time for the whole audience to ask questions. When this time is up, moderator usually announce that you can ask speaker more questions. But speaker is usually  followed by “groupies”, family or conference friends. It is very crowded and noisy, and usually I lost my question momentum force.

On unconference, there is no one-way-speaking part. Topic author gives introduction and initial questions/thoughts. And then discussion emerges. If it is not for you, use the power of two feet and move to another discussion topic (another room).

As an example, after the TestBash Brighton 2017 there was Open Space event. At the end of this event, I had fruitful discussion with Paul Holland and other participants about testing heuristics. He teaches Rapid Software testing and software testing heuristics are part of that class.

Bottom line is that in unconference format you are in control of discussions and you have a chance to shot much more questions!

Testival 2017 is in two weeks in lovely Zadar, Croatia.

We are starting on 1st of September, Friday at 18.00 by proposing discussion topics. Next day, on Saturday, we will execute those discussions divided into slots and across different rooms. Prior those discussions, we will have opening keynote by Alex Rodionov, one of the Watir contributors!

Location is Zadar innovation center. You can apply using this form and admission is free.

All relevant information could be found on conference page: www.testival.eu.

See you in Zadar!

by

TL;DR

This post is about my learning experience on latest Testival meetup.

We had two talks and one 5 minute talk. We started with traditional introduction of every participant. Repsly was again event sponsor.

#1 Zoran Majstorović, ButterflyMX: Ruby Test Suite @ButteflyMX presented Ruby test ecosystem that his company use on daily basis. Those libraries cover whole testing pyramid.  Their web application is developed in Rails framework and they use following ruby gems (libraries):

• rspec – test runner, automated checks and Rails mocks
• FactoryGirl – test data
• capybara – UI automation framework.

Code is on github, and they use branching and pull requests for deploy strategy.  CI system is Semaphore and Code Climate is set of open source Ruby libraries for code analysis.

#2 Marko Filipin, Head brewer and co-founder at Nova runda brewery: A/B testing beer

Nova Runda is one of the first Croatian micro brewery, they are known for their Indiegogo campaign through which they raised money to brew their first commercial beer, APA.

The best beer is one that always taste the same. Striving to that path, they started A/B beer testing. They presented two beers in three cups, A,B,C. They wanted to get statistics how many participants guessed which cups hold same beer. Participants were forbidden to do any commenting while testing the beer (no influence on other participants).

9 of 23 participants noted the difference. The number needs to be 12 so they can claim that they produced same beer in two different batches.

This is known as difference test. Preference test is subjective test. It gives answer which beer is prefered by the tester.

Yes/no test is acceptance test. Is this beer good enough to sell it?

What is beer quality?

• from batch to batch, beer must taste the same
• must have attributes of beer type. If you cooked Pale Ale, it must not taste like Indian Pale Ale.
• ratio of sugar(malts)/bitterness(hops)
• any not wanted tastes?

Zeljko Filipin presented problems with Vim UX in his 5 minute talk.

As a regular user of Vim, I suggest you to try this ultimate Vim distro. and start with basic tutorial found in Zeljko’s blog post.

by

TL;DR

This is learning report on Testival #28 meetup that was held today. Our host was again Repsly in HUB385.

There were 15+ participant with three long talks/hands on presentations and four 5 minute lightning talks.

First we had Dario Đurić from Altima. He presented how to create and test web components. I learned that Polymer is Google framework for web components. As any good framework, polymer has out of the box testing support. Polymer enables developer to couple html, css and javascript in components, making your application frontend easier to develop and maintain in TDD manner.

Marko Elezović from Oradian presented how to write concurrent integration tests for api towards the database. Language was Scala, specs was framework for writing tests. Developed testing framework runs tests concurrently. In order to do that, Marko showed us how he resolved issue where every test suites has dedicated postgres database.

Marko Varat, Repsly Inc: presented UX Testing – Product Development Sanity Check.

I learned about tools UXpin, MixPanel and FullStory, tools that help in testing UX aspects of new features.

There were four lighting talks:  Kreso from Repsly explained how Repsly successfully hired senior tester in tough market, Zeljko presented Selenium bindings in Scratch, Zoran from ButterflyMX explained which frameworks they use in order to do TDD in their  Ruby on Rails project. I presented Ministry of Testing TestSphere cards and possibilities how to use them.

by

TL;DR

This post is report about what I learned at Testival #27 meetup and how I provoked that learning.

Last week we had Testival #27 meetup. Attendant metric was 15/25, which is excellent 0.6! You probably have seen something like this metric in your test reports. 0.6? So what that number means? We recently moved to meetup platform which exposed Testival to local community. 15 testers showed, and 25 applied to meetup. We have total of 65 members in Testival group. This is great improvement for Testival.

Sponsor of this meetup was Repsly, and we met again in HUB385. Repsly is hiring for a QA position. After short introduction of all participants,  we started with lectures and lighting talks.

My takeaways.

1. Ana showed hers PageObject implementation in javascript. Ruby has PageObject gem with lot of out of the box helpers that you need to develop by yourself in javascript.
2. Zeljko showed javascript source code for browser automation in various framework. It is less readable than Ruby code and it seems that Ruby gem ecosystem is stronger than one in javascript.
3. Between two sessions I heard interesting question, how to check large tables using selenium (I always mingle in listening mode in every meetup), and Zeljko mentioned that he successfully used dedicated htl parser for that purpose, not the Watir-webdriver implementation.
4. I was very impressed how Scratch evolved in past few years.
5. There is jenkins plugin that enables you to keep history and version of your application builds.
6. Over beers I learned on real example how is very hard to manage team of programmers. There is no silver bullet, managing a group of programmers is very hard.

Ruby : Javascript in browser automation context 3:0.

Here is small gallery:

by

TL;DR

This post is my report on Testival 2016 that was held last weekend in Rijeka STEPRI center.

First, a few metrics.

We had in total 32 participants, with female/male ratio 12/20!

As this is free event, dropout count is important metrics for us. 15 registered testers did not show, and did not let us know that they will not show. Which means that we wasted a lot of food.

Testival was first time international event:

Serbia: 4

Hungary: 1

Austria: 2

USA: 1

Liberland: 1

We are very excited about that metric!

Here are links to Facebook photo albums (you need to be log in in Facebook): Irja, Zeljko, Zeljko, Zeljko and me.

Here is my observation. Testers were not shy, they jumped in open session proposals without fear and hesitation:

My impression is that several testers problems spawned through all themes.

I got a chance to further model my thinking around idea: “How to kill regression user interface automated testing”, and got excellent feedback and deeper understating of the problem. New material for blog post.

For me, new thing was Splunk product.

And this event introduced for the first time context driven testing school by Ben Simo, that has years of experience of applying context driven principles in his daily work.

Mirjana introduced exploratory testing, and how to transition in daily work from test case step descriptions towards exploratory testing.

My opinion what could be done better for next Testival:

Get proactive help in organising process.

Switch Testival to be Thursday/Friday event.

Add workshops on Thursday day.

More coffee.

Add additional sponsors.

In order to fight against food waste, symbolic price for registration for which value would be given back in form of software testing book or something similar.

Here is audience feedback:

Again, without our sponsors, this event will not be possible:

by