Just 2 weeks to go to UKSTAR and we are so excited! Have you been following UKSTAR and our fabulous committee on Twitter?
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Introducing this weeks speaker: Joep Schuurkes will be presenting his talk ‘What To Look For in a Test Automation Tool’on Monday 11th March, be sure to check out this great talk!
Joep is travelling all the way over to UKSTAR from the Netherlands. Joep wandered into testing in 2006. Two years later he discovered context-driven and realised that testing is actually not that bad a fit for a philosopher. In 2015 he joined Mendix, one reason being that he wanted to increase his technical skills. Since then he’s become more and more involved in automation, while also taking on the roles of scrum master and team lead. Somewhere along his journey (some say it was 2013) he started speaking at conferences and joined DEWT. Outside of work his thoughts tend to revolve around coffee, fountain pens and bouldering.
Continue reading to learn more about Joep..
What inspired you to develop this topic as a talk?
Test automation tools that are being sold by showing how easy it is to build tests and how nice their reports with only passed tests look. Those are good features, but neither touch upon the core of testing: discovering important information about the product. So in a tool demo one thing I want to see is how easy it is to find out why a test failed or resulted in an error. Secondly, those demos never really go into maintainability. What version control and diffing of changes is available? How does the tool deal with different abstraction levels? As soon as your test suite reaches a somewhat moderate size, those features are crucial.
Then, when I started developing my own API testing framework, I found that you can get all those features from existing tools and libraries such as Python, pytest, the requests library and git. And sure, you need some code to tie these together, but nothing too big or too complicated. So in my talk I want to share the features I deem important for a test automation tool and I hope to inspire people to require these features from their tools.
One tip for anyone starting out in software testing?
Read Jerry Weinberg’s “Perfect Software and Other Illusions about Testing”. It’s the only testing book I know that explains what testing is, but doesn’t tell you how to do testing. So it’s a great timeless introduction to the field of testing. And it might make you curious about Jerry Weinberg’s other books.
If you were on a deserted island and could only bring one item with you, which would it be and why?
A refrigerator magnet, to mess with whoever finds me 100 years later.
What is the future of software testing?
Repeating the mistakes of the past – hopefully in new and interesting ways.
Join Joep Schuurkes 11th-12th March at UKSTAR in Central London.
FINAL DAY OF OFFER: Purchase your ticket to receive your cool special edition t-shirt!
