EngEdu Video Write-up: Google Test Automation Lightning Talks

Google Test Automation Conference Lightning Talks

Good and excellent short talks from the 2006 conference covering many testing topics. Slides are available.

01:20 Dan North from Thoughtworks on Getting Lean

• Automated Testing has the secondary effect of enabling two of the Lean Principles: Lean Product Design (maximize discovery by faster releases) and Lean Manufacturing (low variance repeatable testing).
• Sort of supply chain management because design is just before coding is just before release.
• Automated Testing allows for frequent shipping of high quality product.

06:00 Steve Freeman JMock I Done By Five Minutes

• JMock is a library for using mock objects in the test-driven development of Java code.
• JMock’s types allows IDE to expose just right spots. Good error reporting.

10:50 Nat Pryce, The JMock II update

• Update is Java 5, JMock library is framework independent
• Cleaner testing code, better IDE autocomplete
• New refactoring support

15:01 Christine Newman from Progressive Insurance, Getting More Funding for Automated Testing

• Quantify the value of automated testing with numbers like “Production Problems Prevented; Risks Mitigated (by severity); or Hours Saved”

18:20 Andrin von Rechenberg, Google Intern, Improving WURFL data

• Database mobile phone capabilities are hard to test for 8500 user agents.
• Check your logs to see how they navigate, e.g., to find HTTPS capability

23:30 Ade Oshineye from ThoughtWorks, Five Heresies in Five Minutes

• Convert your logs of real people into test cases
• Mutation Testing works (change code, if test passes then test is bad) for high risk, about to be refactored, or bug-prone sections.
• Run actual tests on production hardware with production systems for new release or when making a dummy is hard.
• Test your vendor’s code lest their upgrades break you or you are afraid to upgrade.
• Static analysis works now. Use FindBugs or PyChecker or IntelliJ’s stack analysis server to find bugs people won’t find or broken language idioms.

29:00 Timur Hairullin for Vandex (Russian Search Engine)

• Had unexplained performance problems on an update.
• Measure performance from time between first byte of request to something happening inside browser of older computers; not just to server sending last byte of response.

32:00 James Richardson on Automated Testing: Why Bother?

• How do I quantify Automated Testing? I missed Christine Neuman’s lecture.

34:00 James Lyndsay for Workroom Productions, Automated Tricks for Manual Testors

• Some tests must be manual and observed by good testers; they look for surprisers and emergent behaviors.
• Use snippets of code (your manual testers should code and use Unix)
• Use virtual machine images to hand over bugs.

38:26 Jordon Dea-Mattson, some radiation treatment machine firm

• Working on client/server in life-critical, highly regulated systems.
• Most testing strategies have single points of failure; try thinking of testing defense in depth.
• Collect more data in the (wild) field instead than just crashes.
• Think of software ERP, integrating the whole requirement to delivery chain.
• Strong recommendaton for TestQuest; UI testing tool.

42:10 Curtis “Ovid” Poe with the Perl Foundation, TAP

• TAP (Test Anything Protocol) is a human and machine readable protocol for test output.
• TAP is simple, line oriented, and implemented in C/Perl/Python/Ruby/JavaScript/PostgresSQL
• Driven by PerlQA team and a new language agnostic list is forming.

Overall, a great video.