This is a class I co-teach with Mark Winteringham. The majority of teams now have some form of automated checking/testing on their UI, however with the advancement of tools at other levels of an application, we can move some of those checks to a lower and usually faster to execute layer. This class with introduce you to a whole host of these tools with working examples and reasoning.

Course Length

This class is available a one day or two day format.

Course Description

A lot of teams are heavily dependent on GUI level automated testing/checking.With the majority of automators opting for Selenium WebDriver. Now Selenium is a fantastic project, and WebDriver is superb API. If I was wanting to automate some user journeys in the browser, I would turn to WebDriver. Unfortunately though, WebDriver seems to be the default tool for a lot of, if not all the automated checking teams do, regardless of context, and what it is they are actually trying to check.

This can be problematic for multiple reasons, the main being that these checks tend to be slow and brittle, this of course depends on the skill level of the person creating them, it’s not always the case.

Another big factor is that, by nature of them being at the browser level you almost always end up checking a lot more than what you intend to. They’re not focused and targeted on a specific piece of functionality or behaviour.

It doesn’t have to be this way though.
Tools below the GUI have come along way in recent years. They’re endless javascript libraries available for automated checking of javascript. With more teams adopting APIs, there has been an increase in tools available for doing automated API checking. There has also been huge advancements in visual checking tools, which teams could take advantage of.

In this technical hands on tutorial, Richard and Mark with introduce attendees to these new tools/frameworks. We will work as one big automation team to move existing GUI WebDriver checks further down or up the stack. Examining what the original intention of the check was, and now having more exposure to new tools, could we rewrite them at a different level in the stack. Then reflecting on the impact this has had to our automated checking, are they more targeted or faster than before, time will tell.

The experiential aspect of this tutorial is that it’s up to you the attendees, where we decide checks move to, if they move at all. As mentioned above, we will be working as one big team, so there will be lots of lots of discussion and learning from peers. So the direction the workshop takes is down to you, but of course with our expert guidance.

So if you’re interested in advancing your automated checking, come along.

Takeaways

• Exposure to new frameworks, libraries and tools
• Realisation that using WebDriver has given them lots of transferralbe programmable skills
• More options to tackle automated checking back in the workplace
• Skills and techniques for identifying checks on the wrong level

If you're interested in this course, or have any further questions, please contact me using a method from my footer.