With just four weeks to go to UKSTAR, the excitement is really building in the testing community! We can’t wait to meet you all this March!
Introducing Seretta Gamba back to UKSTAR 2019! Seretta will be presenting her talk ‘Why Cats are the Best Automators‘ on March 11th, 2019.
Seretta has 40 years’ experience in development and fifteen in test automation. After going through all the usual developer roles, in 2001 she was put in charge of test automation. She developed a framework that enabled her company to quickly get excellent results. Having talked about the framework in a couple of conferences she met Dorothy Graham and was invited to write a chapter in the book, Experiences of Test Automation. With Dorothy Graham she has been developing the Test Automation Patterns Wiki and is now writing a story book about the patterns.
Here’s what Seretta has to say..
What inspired you to develop this topic as a talk?
As I was working on my EuroSTAR tutorial, ‘Driving lessons for Test Automators’, in which I try to convey what kind of mindset is necessary to do really excellent test automation, I was repeatedly distracted by my cat. He was purring on my lap. I was just writing about the need to give feedback to the stakeholders of test automation (managers, testers, developers, other test automators) and I thought that cats really are good at giving feedback. Then he started grooming himself and I thought: good test automators also keep their testware always clean. At that point I started to see the similarities between the cat and the test automator mindset and I quickly found all the others I mention in my talk.
One tip for anyone starting out in software testing?
In my career I have been mostly a developer and then a test automator. I’m not really a good tester (if a good tester in Sherlock Holmes, I would be Watson!), so I can only suggest that before you really dig in, find out if you’re Sherlock or Watson.
If you were on a deserted island and could only bring one item with you, which would it be and why?
Difficult question! At first, I thought I would bring my pan-flute, but then I thought that it wouldn’t really help me survive on the deserted island, so I would rather bring one of those many layered swiss army knives.
What is the future of software testing?
At the latest conferences there were talks proclaiming, that testing will soon be done by AI. I don’t really believe it or better, I really hope that’s not the case. Thinking how complex testing is, if it can be done by some robot, then they can do so many other things, that we will sooner or later find ourselves in some Matrix-World!
Joking aside, maybe testers will be teaching some robot how to do it, exactly as they are now ‘teaching’ our current stupid automation tools to execute the test cases automatically, but there will still have to be somebody that really knows what’s going on. What I definitely believe, is that testing will move more to the front, I mean to testing the specifications or, even better to be part of the development of specifications.
Don’t miss Seretta Gamba at UKSTAR 2019. Join her among the community of testers to network and learn.
