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Twin Cities
Quality Assurance Association (TCQAA)
Located in the metropolitan area of Minneapolis and
St. Paul, Minnesota, |
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Speaker: Jamie L. Mitchell Title: Do Something to Something in Expectation of Something: A [Hopefully] Refreshingly Different Look at Testing and Automation Audience level: ABOUT THE SPEAKER AND PRESENTATION:Abstract:
During the Spring ’03 PSQT conference, I hosted a workshop called, “Toward a Unified Test Terminology.” I put this workshop together with the overall theme of, “Can’t we all just get along.” What I learned was essentially, no, we can’t.
Everyone had their own idea of what testing was. The brighter the speaker, the less likely he or she was to compromise on the holy grail of terminology. Testing terms like “test case”, “scenario”, and “test plan” each led to a discussion that could have been imported directly from the www.TowerOfBabel.com web site. Heaven forbid that we would have gotten into other issues like automation.
Seems to me that we keep reloading the shotgun after shooting ourselves in the foot. How in the world can we explain our value-add to management or the developer community when we can’t even agree between ourselves on what it is we do?
This presentation will be my attempt to strip the concepts of testing and automation down to their bare minimums. The title is a reference to [my] basic idea of what a test step is at its bare minimum:
Do something to something in expectation of something
Perform an action against a system and compare the resulting state to what we predicted would happen.
Using the basic premise, that, while we all may have different ideas as to what scenarios, test cases, and test plans look like, a single test step should be a simple action that we can agree on. I will use this minimalist test step to look at different test automation architectures that are currently in use. Why doesn’t record and playback work? What might be the gotchas of an Action Word scheme? Why can testers perform tests so easily and our automation continually fails?
This presentation will include [hopefully] useful information on automation practices, tools, designs, and techniques in the new century.
Bio:Jamie L. Mitchell is the Principal Consultant at Test & Automation Consulting LLC in Minneapolis, MN. He is a frequent speaker at various quality conferences including QAI, SQE and PSQT. He has long been involved in test automation as automator, designer, architect, tutorial instructor and mentor. He has worked in test automation since the first automation tools were released in Windows 3.0, including stints with American Express, Prudential Insurance, IBM AS/400 division, and ShowCase Corporation. He earned the Master of Computer Science degree in 1992 from Lehigh University and is a QAI Certified Software Test Engineer. He resides in Farmington, MN, and is an active member of the Twin Cities Quality Assurance Association.
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