Tuesday, May 20, 2014

Monday, May 19, 2014

WAAT at StarEast2014

I was speaking about "Build the 'right' regression suite using Behavior Driven Testing (BDT)" at StarEast 2014 and met Marcus Merrell who was speaking about "Automated Analytics Testing with Open Source Tools". I figured out deep into our conversation that he has used WAAT, and a few others at the table also were aware of and had used WAAT before. Felt great!

Thursday, May 15, 2014

Update from StarEast 2014 - "Build the 'right' regression suite using BDT"

I had a great time speaking about how to "Build the 'right' regression suite using Behavior Driven Testing (BDT)".

This time, I truly understood the value of practice, dry-runs. Before the webinar for NY Selenium Meetup group, I presented the content to my colleagues in the ThoughtWorks, Pune office and also shared the same with the hivemind @ ThoughtWorks and got great feedback. That helped me tremendously in making my content more rock-solid and well-tuned.

As a result, I was able to deliver the content, to a very enthusiastic and curious audience, who turned up in great numbers (>105) to hear about what the $@$#^$% is BDT, and how can it help in avoiding the nightmare of long, unfruitful, painful Regression Test cycles.

The slides from the talk are available here and the video is available here.

Thursday, May 8, 2014

Update from Webinar on "Build the 'right' regression suite using BDT" for NY Selenium Meetup

I had a challenging, yet good time speaking in a Webinar for the New York Selenium Meetup community on how to "Build the 'right' regression suite using Behavior Driven Testing (BDT)". This webinar was conducted on 6th May 2014 at 6.30pm and I am very thankful to Mona Soni to help organize the same.

Before I speak about the challenges, here are the slides and the audio + screen recording from the webinar. The video is not cleaned-up ... I had started recording the session and then we did wait for a few minutes before we started off, but you can forward to around the 01:15 min mark and audio starts from that point.

This was challenging because of 2 main reasons:
> With a webinar, I find it difficult to connect with the audience. I am not able to gauge if the content is something they already know about, so I can proceed faster. Or, if they are not following, I need to go slower. Or, the topic is just not interesting enough to them. There may be other reasons as well, but I just do not get that real-time feedback which is so important when explaining a concept and a technique.
Though there were some good interactions and great questions in form of chat, I miss that eye-to-eye connect. This webinar was conducted using GoToMeeting. Maybe next time I do this, I need to try to get webcams enabled for atleast a good few people attending to understand that body language.

> The 2nd challenge I had was purely my own body not being able to adjust well enough. I had flown in from India to Florida to speak in STAREAST 2014 conference just a couple of days ago, and was still adjusting to the jet-lag. Evening times turned out to be my lowest-energy points on the day and I felt myself struggling to keep focus, talk and respond effectively. I would like to apologize to the attendees if they felt my content delivery was not up to the mark for this reason.

I appreciate any feedback on the session, and looking forward to connect with you and talk about Testing, Test Automation, my open-source tools (TaaS, WAAT, TTA) and of course BDT!