DevOpsQA NJ just held our A
ugust Meetup on Test Automation Tools and Processes with Polina Rodov and Kamlesh from Medidata, Anil Jaising from JP Morgan Chase and myself, Tanya Kravtsov, from Audible. The venue, food and refreshments were provided by Audible at a state-of-the-art, vast office space in
Jersey City with amazing views of the NYC skyline. The main topic of the meetup was Testing and Test Automation tools and processes and how they are used in different companies.
Takeaways from QUEST and StarEast
After fun networking over pizza, wine and beer, I kicked off with an overview of my takeaways from Quest and StarEast QA Conferences. I gave a brief summary of the session that I presented at the conference titled “The Road to DevOps” followed by highlights from the most memorable sessions on Test Automation, Metrics and Mobile Testing. I focused on the importance of identifying and addressing the bottlenecks in the product delivery cycle which include manual processes such as test data management, environment configuration and test
execution.
WOW (W-What we do O – on time W- with tools) at Medidata
Next, Polina and Kamlesh from Medidata presented Tools and Frameworks used at Medidata (which provides cutting edge clinical solutions). The unique presentation style portrayed the overall solution as a cooking pot, with tools presented as ingredients and testing as degustation. Medidata solutions are built on top of Service Oriented Architecture and utilize tools such as Jasmine and Cucumber for automation, Github, TravisCI and HipChat for CI, Medistrana and GoCD for deployment, Mist, JIRA Capture and Bug Magnet for testing, and SumoLogic and NewRelic for monitoring. Polina and Kamlesh also spent some time describing VCR, an alternative way of mocking APIs. VCR allows to run the tests against prerecorded response, but still faces challenges if cassette files become stale due to backend service changes. The session was followed by intense Q &A covering Code Coverage tools, PACT and minimizing cycle time.
Acceptance Test Driven Development
Our last session of the day was ATDD (Acceptance Test Driven Develoment) with Anil Jaising, Executive Director at JP Morgan Chase. Anil set the background by talking about history of Lean which came from manufacturing, specifically Toyota factory. It is very important f
or Testers and to be able to pull the chord whenever they find a critical defect. Anil suggested reading the IEEE paper by Robert Martin and Grigori Melnik, the primary point of which is that we need to start thinking about testing while requirements are still developed and avoid assuming that testing is testing. He then gave a great definition of ATDD – from user stories to business value, ATDD is a team sport as opposed to test driven development which is more individual.
At the end of the sessions, we had some great conversations with group members who stayed behind. Looking forward to our next session. To learn more about exciting opportunities at Audible visit http://about.audible.com/