This is the fourth in a series of articles highlighting speakers at SauceCon 2020. SauceCon brings together the global community of Sauce Labs users and continuous testing experts to learn from each other and level up their automated testing and continuous delivery skills. This year’s event will be held April 27-29 in Austin, Texas, and DevOps.com will be there, broadcasting live.
As test engineering manager at ShopKeep, a point of sale solution provider, Hugh McCamphill leads the company’s internal tools and test improvement team and works to further the test and quality focus of the company as a whole. 
Every year, thousands of small businesses rely on ShopKeep to track inventory and sales, and ring up millions of customers. Because of that demand, testing is critical.
With over 15 years of testing experience, Hugh is up to the task. He started out on an agile team, working closely with developers doing testing and writing end-to-end UI tests.
“People have always struggled with how long end-to-end tests take to run,” said Hugh. “It’s become less of a problem in the desktop space, but tests created in Appium can be slower and harder to distribute.”
That’s what drove Hugh to his presentation topic for SauceCon 2020: “Not Just Accessibility IDs: Speed Up Your Appium Tests for Faster Feedback.”
“I wanted to share what we have done with improving the speed of our own Appium tests and suites so that we get more feedback sooner. We no longer rely solely on running tests overnight, we have Appium tests running on every pull request to the app,” he said.
During his presentation, Hugh will help SauceCon attendees better understand the time-consuming aspects of a test and demonstrate some options to reduce test time when interacting and asserting against elements. He will also explain why it’s important to understand the abstractions that you are using (as they might be slowing you down), why to be careful when querying multiple elements and show some of the capabilities that exist to speed up Appium tests.
Throughout his career, Hugh has developed deep expertise in test automation across a range of languages, APIs and tools, and loves sharing this knowledge with others at speaking engagements. He has also been the organizer of the Belfast Selenium Meetup for the last several years.
When he’s not talking about testing, he loves traveling with his family and two young children, playing squash and watching football—or what we in the U.S. would call soccer.
You can hear from Hugh and more than 30 other expert speakers at SauceCon 2020, the fourth annual Sauce Labs user conference. To see a full list of presentations or to register, visit the SauceCon website.