Recently in automation Category

My 36 hours in Portland/Beaverton are now over. After getting to the hotel room late on Thursday morning the guys and I met up for breakfast at IHOP and then broke off to watch the Croatia - Germany game before regrouping for our poster session. We literally only had to walk across the street to the IBM site, which was right next to Nike World Headquarters. Michael and I had a little trouble finding the building we needed to go, but we eventually made it. They had a tent setup, and each of us got a space to put our posters. I tried to get some extra things printed out, but ran into technical difficulties and not enough time, so I went with the slides that I had printed up in San Jose. So I spent the next 10 minutes pasting everything into place and I also got my laptop out and got a movie looping showing the automation framework that my team built. Once the poster session started it was roughly 4 hours of us alternating between standing next to our posters and talking to people about our work as they walked by and walking by other people's posters and talking to them about their work. It wasn't exactly what I was expecting but it was alright. I got to meet some new people and see some work that I hadn't heard about before. I also got to say hi to Erika (who was also presenting a poster) who had moved up to Beaverton from Almaden, and she helped us launch IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition a while back. After everything was over some of the guys and I headed downtown to check things out and have dinner. On Friday I got up at 4 AM to get to the airport and was back in San Jose by 8:30 AM. After that it was time to hit the grindstone again.

A few weeks ago there was an announcement at work where they were accepting abstracts to take part in a technical exchange program between my work site in San Jose and our IBM work site in Beaverton, Oregon, just outside of Portland (and right next to Nike world headquarters).  Since it wasn't any extra work for me, I recycled my abstract about Test Automation (see previous entry for slides and audio recording of my talk) and submitted it.  It got accepted, and now I get to go up to Portland this week and preach the gospel of Test Automation and recommend that other groups adopt the framework and I and the team I work on developed.  In addition to me getting to go, two more guys from my group get to go.  Tony is going to talk about Continuous Integration while Michael is going to talk about our contributions to Lucene (open source text search engine written in java).  The only bummer is that since I had to book the trip last minute all the flights back to San Jose on Sunday evening are booked, so I can't have Timber come up and spend the weekend with me there.  So I am going to fly up there on Wednesday evening, have the event on Thursday, and fly back on Friday morning.  

I finally got permission (kind of) to post my slides and recording from my presentation at the QSE Conference a few weeks ago.  This was an internal IBM conference about test automation, continuous integration, agile methodologies, etc...  My talk was about test automation in general and what me and my team is doing around it.  So if you are interested, or are having trouble sleeping, feel free to download the slides and recording.  I can't post any of the source code or videos of the test automation running for lots of intellectual property reasons.  But if you have questions about anything feel free to email me at tom.carroll[at]gmail.com .

I found this video about a week ago but I finally got a chance to watch it while some of my test automation stuff was running (healthier than eating a donut). If you are interested in Automator for Mac OS X feel free to watch the video and check out more information here. If not, well, you've probably stopped reading this posting by now. :-)

Thanks to Matt for sending me a link to this blog posting about Agile friendly Test Automation Tools and Frameworks. Overall I can totally relate to the pain associated with trying to do automation with tools that are not suited for the project. And if you are going to do real automation testing for an agile project it makes a huge difference if you can write the test code in a real programming language instead of some weird, proprietary, scripting language.

My 90 minute talk yesterday went pretty well.  I did run into one snag though.  I showed up to the room 30 minutes before my talk was scheduled to begin, and I spent 29.5 minutes wrestling with 2 different projectors to get my slides to display.  Luckily I was finally able to get it to work in time and I started on time and ended about 6 minutes early.  I talked about philosophy, what works for my team, did 2 demonstrations, showed source code, and showed some the artifacts of the test automation that my team does.  I'll have to find out if the slides can be made public.  I'm fairly certain that the source code and demonstration movies cannot be made public.  But if you are an IBMer I can share it all with you.  :-)  So overall I feel like it was worth the time and effort to give the talk because I think my team's work will help other groups to become more effective in how they test software.

Tomorrow is the testing conference that I have been preparing for.  I'm finishing up the last touches on my slides, and also getting the demo stuff ready.  I've decided to make videos of the test automation running instead of doing a live demo because I know from experience that something will break that will cause at best a delay or at worst the demo to not get done at all.  So after my slides and videos are done all I need to do is check out the room where I'll be doing the presentation to do a quick run through, make several backup copies of the slides in different formats, and then practice some more.  I feel like I am preparing to do a one man show on broadway.  :-)

A while back I submitted two abstracts to a testing conference, one about Test Automation and another about Continuous Integration.  I got word back that the abstract for Continuous Integration was accepted while the one about Test Automation was not.  Right on...  So late last week I got a copy of the agenda along with a request that I send in my bio and slides for my 90 minute presentation by this coming Friday.  So I started working on my slides for Continuous Integration and was almost done with them when I looked at the Agenda.  When I did, I saw that I was scheduled to speak about Test Automation.  I thought that was weird, so I emailed the coordinators and sure enough they made a mistake and I really am going to present my work on Test Automation.  Doh!  So I get to shelve my slides on Continuous Integration and get something whipped together to turn in by tomorrow.  So I guess I should stop blogging and finish up my slides.  :-)  I'm not sure if I'll be allowed to make them public or not, I'm guessing I will.  So if I am able to make them public and if my presentation is video taped I'll try to post them.