Michelle & Automated Testing 1: Some Thoughts About the Automation Guild Conference 2017
At the beginning 2017, I attended the Automation Guild Conference 2017, an online conference dedicated 100% to test automation, which gave me a good start of a new year. In this post, I would like to share with you some thoughts about the conference.
About the Conference
It was a five-day online conference. The price was 197 US dollars which would be affordable for most developers. Because it was an online conference, there is no other expense. Compared to an on-site conference, it is a more effective way to learn since you don’t need to worry about the bookings and the expenses for hotel and transportation.
The conference host is Joe Colantonio, who is a test automation architect for a large Fortune 100 company with over fifteen years of automation and performance testing experience. Joe is also the founder of a popular test automation blog joecolantonio.com, where he has been blogging and sharing his expertise in the past six years.
Following is a summary of the conference schedule:
- Day 1: Frameworks
- Day 2: Best Practices
- Day 3: Automation Techniques
- Day 4: DevOps In Test
- Day 5: Mobile, API & Unit Testing
My Top Picks from the Conference
- Automation starts from development
- Automation tests is a software, we are using a software to test software
- Automation developer = developer + tester + ops
- Automation developer cannot replace manual tester
- There is a trend that manual tester to be technical tester
- How to select the automation tools?
- How and what automation developer should communicate with your managers and your teams?
- How to help your company to create the culture of automation?
- What soft skill of an automation developer should have? The speaker thought the most important skill is communication. Automation developer is a bridge between developers and QA.
- BDD and TDD and ATDD
- Performance testing
- CI system and release pipeline
- We automation developer are making a net for the release to catch the bugs and avoid the bugs to be released. It is not firewall yet, since it is a net, there are holes in it but we should make the holes smaller. Even automation tests are not making revenue but we STOP losing revenue.
Live Q & A Session Schedule
If you would like to know more details about the session, please Click Here.
From the sessions, attendees were able to watch an online presentation from the speakers. Most of the speakers are test framework author or the company founders/co-founders. Each presentation is about one hour long and the audiences had 30 minutes to ask questions.
The questions could be sent to the host by email, slack or through live chatting. Audiences were able to communicate with each other during the conference by live chatting and slack. Actually, I found these sessions were very helpful for me to understand the solutions from other companies and experience/thoughts from other automation developers.
After conference was completed, all audiences were invited to a linked group and a slack channel. We created a strong network of test automation professionals from different countries.
We also did some small polls and collected very useful data such as how many peoples use selenium grid, browserstack /saucelabs or jenkins slaves.
If you want to know more about the Automation Guild Conference 2017, please visit their website: https://automationguild.com
- Michelle & Automated Testing 5:Internal API and External API Automation Testing, Lessons Learned - August 15, 2017
- Michelle & Automated Testing 4: How to Integrate Jenkins, Sonar and Github for your Pull Request? - July 27, 2017
- Michelle & Automated Testing 3: Using Maven AWS S3 Repository Instead of Nexus Server - June 28, 2017
