April 27, 2015

Lecture by Jason Huggins: Fixing HealthCare.gov, One Test at a Time

I am loving working at Fitbit - Boston! I have only been here a bit under two months, but I am already making great friends at work. I am learning not just to write Selenium / Java code, but how to be a software developer. 

I noticed on the  Sauce Labs Blog that Jason Huggins, creator of Selenium 1.0 and founder / CTO of Sauce Labs was gave a talk on his involvement on testing the HealthCare.gov website. I commandeered a conference room here at Fitbit - Boston and did a screening of the Meetup talk on YouTube. 




Jason Huggins presented a wonderful personal account bout his experience in being part of the "tech surge" team responsible for analyzing and fixing the HealthCare.gov site. He speaks candidly, talking about his anxiety, his confusion, using his public messages on Twitter and private text messages to illustrate the story. It presents a good slice of life of what it was like in the war room of this project. 


It presents more of a personal than a technical experience. Even if you are not technical, the talk is very entertaining. Jason is quite a good storyteller. 



The first hour details Jason's personal narrative. The next fifteen minutes deals with "Lessons Learned", and the last fifteen minutes is a call to action to get bright minds to work with and get involved with government projects, for the good of the country. 

If you want to get involved, Jason was mentioning that you can go the White House Playbook to https://github.com/WhiteHouse/playbook, review what they have at https://playbook.cio.gov/ and you can "do a pull" on their GitHub section to make a change. 


One minor quibble... Jason mentioned that he thinks automated testing should only be done by Java developers, and not with those non-technical manual testers. After this project? He found out that they do have their uses... As someone who has spent fifteen years as a manual tester, I have to say that I am very glad for that! I just wish that there was more a push to convert manual testers to automation instead of having every manual tester fending for him or herself trying to make the transition. It would have made my life a lot easier!  




-T.J. Maher
 Sr. QA Engineer, Fitbit
 Boston, MA

// Automated tester for [ 1 ] month and counting!

Please note: 'Adventures in Automation' is a personal blog about automated testing. It is not an official blog of Fitbit.com

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