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Richard Bradshaw
Slalom Build (UK)

Biography

Hey I'm Richard Bradshaw, aka FriendlyTester. A true driving force in the software testing and quality domain. I’m a tester, automator, speaker, writer, teacher, strategist, leader, and a friendly human. My work has impacted the career of thousands of quality professionals across the globe and helped many companies achieve highly effective testing. I specialise in two areas; human centric automation in the context of software testing, automation that truly adds value to the existing team testing efforts. I avoid the big bang automation efforts, and instead analyse the context, measure testability, and form an approach that adds value immediately, and doesn’t completely disrupt existing testing efforts. This results in automation that allows teams to move efficiently and confidently. The second is the whole team approach to quality to help teams deliver the high quality products. This goes beyond testing but helping teams implement practices and approaches to test early, test often and be able to measure that the work we’ve done has had a positive impact on the product. I’m fluent in all areas of software development and can code in multiple different languages. I also have vast tool knowledge and experience. I'm a co-creator of the 'Automation in Testing' namespace. A namespace aimed at improving the industries use of automation in the context of testing. You can read more about Automation in Testing (AiT) over at https://automationintesting.com, and see our event & training pages for where we'll be and what we offer. We provide training all around the world on how to design human centric valuable automation, that truly supports your testing efforts. I don't believe there is a single approach to testing software, I believe we need to adapt our approach to the context. To do this, I'm constantly adding new tools to my toolbox, so that I can deal with the diverse and exciting world of software development."

About the Presentation

The End Game
Keynote Speech

 

Automation in Testing is hard, really hard, I believe this is widely accepted as a truth. But not all automated tests are created equal, some are much harder than others. The hardest of them all, ‘end-to-end’. Especially when those end-to-end tests start at the user interface, involve 3rd parties, and may even end at a user interface. So, why is it that this is the most popular type of automated testing in practice and where does it end? 

 

In order to answer that question we need to take a look at how we got here, and if we could go back in time and alter things, what would we alter? Why did automating on the UI become the defacto approach to automated testing? Why is the adoption of smaller more targeted automated tests on other layers of systems not more widespread? But in reality, aren’t all automated tests end to end?

 

Even though the history is the same for everyone, not everyone is living in the same reality. In this talk we are going to fly through how we got into this position and explore six key concepts that can enable everyone to understand their current reality and plan to elevate their automation game. We’ll cover testability, technical system knowledge, team approach, tools and programming skills and much more.

 

Takeaways:

  • Identify the restraints that are holding your automation game back
  • Deconstruct the journey the industry has gone on with regards to automated testing
  • Understand the importance of technical system knowledge in relation to automated testing
  • Break down the mentality required to approach automating a system and how that compares to using a system
  • Categorise different types of automated testing available to us