Blogging about automated testing frameworks

When I first started this blog, my undergrad and grad school degrees in computer science and software engineering were gathering dust! What a difference a few years makes.

This blog started way back when I was still trying to break into the automated testing field. It became more than that once I was hired at Fitbit-Boston, embedded in the team developing automated test frameworks. I started writing about:

• Setting up a development environment with IntelliJ / Maven, then with IntelliJ / Gradle, then Eclipse / Gradle. 
• Taking a deeper dive into Gradle, exploring Groovy, using it to run simple tests.
• Using both TestNG and JUnit4 ways of making assertions. Suddenly, Hamcrest.
• Abstracting the page using the Page Object model.
• Using CSS Selectors to find and manipulate web elements on the page.
• How to organize the web element selectors: first in enums, then in By statements.
• Wrapping Selenium calls, placing them in a CommonUtils library.
• Doing away with wrapping Selenium calls and just using Page Factory.
• Performing API testing with Apache's HTTP Components and cURL.
• Passing data to tests using pojos and builder patterns,
• Showing examples of good logging for tests.
• Experiments with setting up a virtual dev environment with VirtualBox, Vagrant, and Docker.
• Coming up with various programming projects, and uploading the source code to GitHub.

As a manual tester, I loved getting paid to explore and understand new technologies, see how they do (or don't) work. As an automated developer, there are so much more technologies to explore!

Selenium Conference 2016

Ugh! I always feel so far behind... Selenium Conf 2016 happened in Bangalore, India back in 6/24/2016 to 6/26/2016, a whole four days ago, and I still haven't had any time to check out their schedule...

I love that they turn their schedule posted on the web as a way to archive the presenters videos and slides. https://confengine.com/selenium-conf-2016/schedule

What I am excited about is:

• Selenium Grid Workshop
• Testing as a Container : Using Docker with selenium and friends to ship fast
• Cross-platform, Multi-device Instant Communication Testing in Parallel using Appium and Docker

This is exactly what I was looking for!

... I wonder if over the Fourth of July Weekend I can fit in a spare day to watch these videos, take notes, and turn them into new blog entries?

As always, Happy Testing!

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

// QA Engineer since Aug. 1996
// Automation developer for [ 1.5 ] years and still counting!
// Check out Adventures in Automation on Facebook!