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Tag: SauceCon

  • SauceCon Speaker Profile: Jenny Bramble

    SauceCon Speaker Profile: Jenny Bramble

    This is the fourth in a series of articles highlighting speakers at SauceCon 2019. 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 23-25 in Austin, Texas.

    Jenny Bramble started out her career in test engineering as a waitress. Of course, she didn’t realize it at the time, but the skills she gained from waiting tables have served her well throughout her professional life. Learning how to communicate needs between several wildly different groups turned out to be an especially valuable skill in test engineering.

    Even now, after making the jump from support to DevOps to manual and then automated testing, Jenny believes that the human element is foundational.

    At Willowtree, Jenny works as the test lead on a project team of five to eight developers and three to six test engineers. She leads their testing efforts and works with clients to create products that delight their end users. The concept of delighting users truly guides Jenny’s day-to-day work. “Creating products that make you happy to use them feeds the part of my personality that loves people and wants to make an impact on their lives. It’s a reason I got into testing in the first place,” she said.

    At SauceCon 2019, Jenny will present, “Creating Automation Engineers from Scratch.” She will share her personal experience in adopting and embracing automated testing. “Automation is an incredible tool, but creating automation engineers from manual testers is hard,” she said. “Even if testers are willing, they have a lot of hurdles to get over to feel like the same kind of subject matter experts in automation as they are in manual testing.”

    When she isn’t working on delighting clients through automation, Jenny has many hobbies that keep her busy. She quilts, crochets, knits, weaves, cooks and even recently took up axe-throwing! Her two cats, Dax and Dante, keep her company through it all.

    You can hear from Jenny and more than 30 other expert speakers at SauceCon 2019, the third-annual Sauce Labs user conference. To see a full list of presentations or to register, visit the SauceCon website.

    — Rebecca Cramer

  • SauceCon Speaker Profile: Titus Fortner

    SauceCon Speaker Profile: Titus Fortner

    This is the third in a series of articles highlighting speakers at SauceCon 2019. 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 23-25 in Austin, Texas.

    The old adage says, “Third time’s a charm.” When it comes to SauceCon speaker Titus Fortner, the cliche proves true: Testing is his third career. Titus first went to the Naval Academy, studied nuclear engineering and became a submarine officer—traveling the world doing everything from launching ballistic missiles to helping automate and streamline communication among the senior staff of the commanding general in Iraq. When he left the Navy, Titus went back to school for a year to learn computer science, then got a job as a junior developer at a startup. Focusing on test automation was an accident, but the influence testing had on the overall system and process was immediately appealing to him.

    Titus then became a core contributor to the Selenium project and the project lead for Watir, an open source testing library built on top of Selenium, as well as numerous other testing related Ruby gems. He also implemented automated testing solutions at five different companies before joining Sauce Labs as a Senior Solutions Architect. Today, he works closely with customers to help improve their testing practices.

    At SauceCon 2019, Titus will present, “Page Objects: You’re Doing It Wrong.” Although Page Objects enable newer users to write sophisticated tests against an application, Titus has found that the Page Object Pattern is often misused. “There are lots of different ideas on what makes a good implementation, and I’ve actually tried most of them at one point or another and have personal experience that informs my recommendations of certain approaches over others,” he said. “Smart people disagree with me on some of these, and my goal at SauceCon is to present both sides while explaining my reasons for the preferences I have.”

    When he isn’t convincing customers how to better use Page Objects, Titus reads, writes open source code and takes day trips with his blind dog who loves car rides.

    You can hear from Titus and more than 30 other expert speakers at SauceCon 2019, the third-annual Sauce Labs user conference. To see a full list of presentations or to register, visit the SauceCon website.

    — Rebecca Cramer

  • SauceCon 2019 Speaker Profile: Melissa Benua

    SauceCon 2019 Speaker Profile: Melissa Benua

    This is the second in a series of articles highlighting speakers at SauceCon 2019. 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 23-25 in Austin, Texas.

    SauceCon speaker Melissa Benua loves horses and riding dressage. Derived from a French word that means “training,” dressage is all about creating strength, discipline and precision. It’s fitting, because she is also passionate about training and mentoring junior-level engineers and increasing developer efficiency—which she’ll be talking about in her presentation.

    At SauceCon 2019, Melissa will present “Continuous Deployment for ‘Mature’ Codebases.” I asked her why this topic was important to her. “When starting a new project, it’s easy to take advantage of modern agile development practices, because you’re starting from scratch,” she said. “However, the reality is that isn’t the case for most projects. Our challenge then is how we can take code that may be many years old and transform it into a lean, mean, continuously-deploying machine.”

    In her presentation, Melissa plans to deliver just that: a road map for getting to a release cycle that deploys on-demand from a one that may take weeks or months. She will leverage her personal experience in significantly re-architecting the deployment structure and offer practical advice to anyone managing a more mature codebase.

    Melissa has worked in nearly every software development role there is—dev, test, DevOps and program management—at companies big and small and somewhere in-between. She has created and run high-availability, high-quality services for PlayFab, Bing, Cortana and Xbox One, and now at mParticle as a senior technical lead.

    When she’s not poring over code or training newer engineers, Melissa enjoys spending time with her two small children—and of course, riding her horse. She travels extensively and presents at industry conferences worldwide.

    You can hear from Melissa and more than 30 other expert speakers at SauceCon 2019, the third-annual Sauce Labs user conference. To see a full list of presentations or to register, visit the SauceCon website.

    — Rebecca Cramer

  • SauceCon 2019 Speaker Profile: Dave Haeffner

    SauceCon 2019 Speaker Profile: Dave Haeffner

    This is the first in a series of articles highlighting speakers at SauceCon 2019. 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 23-25 in Austin, Texas.

    SauceCon 2019 speaker Dave Haeffner says he dabbles in Selenium—but it might be more accurate to say he eats, sleeps and breathes it. In fact, Dave is the writer of the Elemental Selenium tip newsletter, which is read by thousands of testing professionals, as well as the creator and maintainer of the-internet (an open source web app that’s perfect for writing automated tests against), author of “The Selenium Guidebook,” and an active member of the Selenium project.

    Despite his background, believe it or not Dave stumbled into automated software testing circa 2009 with Selenium IDE. He was a network engineer who didn’t have a background in programming or software testing. He and his new teammates eventually evolved their automation practice into a test harness written in Ruby (in fact, they were Sauce Labs’ first Ruby customer!). Today Dave considers himself fortunate enough to be paid to work full-time on open source software—Selenium IDE in particular.

    The Sauce Labs team is fortunate to have Dave present again at SauceCon 2019. At this year’s event, Dave is on a mission to break the stereotype that record and playback is a bad thing. He used to believe it, too, but wants to help squash the stigma. In this talk, Dave will show examples of how Selenium IDE can reliably augment and level-up your testing practice regardless of your team’s test automation maturity or your level of technical experience. “If people take away just one thing from my talk, it’s that record and playback with Selenium IDE is worth a shot,” he said of his planned presentation.

    Want to give it a try? Download the latest version.

    Outside of work, Dave spends time with his wife and daughter, exploring the new city they call home, Tel Aviv. He also enjoys learning and practicing Hebrew.

    You can hear from Dave and more than 30 other expert speakers at SauceCon 2019, the third annual Sauce Labs user conference. To see a full list of presentations or to register, visit the SauceCon website.

    — Rebecca Cramer

  • SauceCon Speaker Profile: Shivani Sharma, Slack

    SauceCon Speaker Profile: Shivani Sharma, Slack

    Just Say No to Flaky Tests: Releasing Code with Confidence

    Shivani Sharma doesn’t like anything flaky—unless it’s baked goods.

    Shivani is senior engineering manager at Slack, working on test automation for Slack’s iOS, Android and web applications. An avid baker, Shivani thinks flakiness should stay in the kitchen.

    Although “flaky” is a common adjective describing automated tests, the Slack test automation team wanted to be better and create value by delivering deterministic results. The team’s mission is “to make our software development process simpler, more productive and our product more pleasant to use.”

    Worthy goals, to be sure. To that end, Shivani will present on, “Releasing Code with Confidence,” at the upcoming SauceCon conference in San Francisco June 6-8. Her presentation will discuss how Slack’s automation team approached the common problem of flaky tests to build a reliable feedback system into their continuous integration pipeline for code hundreds of developers write and release every day. This talk will provide actionable takeaways that can be used in other organizations, too.

    In addition to baking and “crème brûlée-ing,” as she describes it, Shivani is an avid runner and has run eight half-marathons. To give her knees a break, she’s excited to participate in her first Olympic distance triathlon this summer. She has spent 10 years working in Silicon Valley, holding positions at Google, BigFix and IBM, as well as Slack. Shivani holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from UCLA.

    SauceCon, the first-ever Sauce Labs user conference, is a three-day event filled with training, workshops, best practices and visionary content from the leading minds in automated testing. For more on upcoming SauceCon presentations or to register, visit the SauceCon website.

    About the Author / Rebecca Cramer

    Rebecca Cramer is a writer and communications strategist specializing in technology. With more than 20 years of experience across disciplines including marketing, internal and executive communications at companies such as Dell and Quest Software, Rebecca is passionate about creating and sharing good content of all kinds. In her spare time, she enjoys spending time at the beach and hiking in her native Southern California.

  • SauceCon Profile: Greg Sypolt, Gannett

    SauceCon Profile: Greg Sypolt, Gannett

    Using Design Patterns to Improve Automated Testing

    Test automation architect Greg Sypolt of Gannett | USA Today Network fell into a testing career by accident. As an on-call software engineer who spent many late nights early in his career discovering that many bugs were caused by a lack of test coverage, he developed a passion for optimizing software and building quality into every stage of the continuous integration pipeline.

    At the upcoming SauceCon conference, Greg will present on, “Using Design Patterns to Improve Automated Testing.” Attendees will learn how to transform their new or existing automated tests to speed development and reduce maintenance impact.

    A self-proclaimed technology geek, Greg is passionate about a few things: DIY projects (he recently finished his basement single-handedly), John Denver songs (one in particular, see below), outdoor sports and speeding up development with design patterns. In Greg’s view, a design pattern is a general reusable solution to reduce commonly occurring problems in software design. A design pattern is not a finished design that can be transformed directly into code. It is a description or template on how to solve a problem that can be used in many different situations.

    At Gannett | USA Today Network, Greg is responsible for leading the test automation architecture team to build and maintain testing solutions, evaluate test coverage, and champion continuous integration across 40+ Gannett products. The test automation organization at Gannett | USA Today Network has built a platform that enables teams to move at their desired pace through a balance of autonomy and collaboration. Their goal is to ensure every team is successful when using the self-service model. The vision is clear for test automation: they believe it starts with everyone on the team owning quality. Making this shift requires daily collaboration and planning to build quality into every stage of the pipeline.

    Greg grew up in a small town in West Virginia (Take Me Home, Country Roads!) and now calls Northern Virginia home. He is a husband, father of three kids and an avid do-it-yourselfer. Greg enjoys presenting at conferences and blogging about automated testing strategies, testing frameworks, standards and continuous integration.

    Join Greg and other presenters at SauceCon, the first-ever Sauce Labs user conference. SauceCon is a three-day event filled with training, workshops, best practices, and visionary content from the leading minds in automated testing. For more on upcoming SauceCon presentations or to register, visit the SauceCon website.

    About the Author / Rebecca Cramer

    Rebecca Cramer is a writer and communications strategist specializing in technology. With more than 20 years of experience across disciplines including marketing, internal and executive communications at companies such as Dell and Quest Software, Rebecca is passionate about creating and sharing good content of all kinds. In her spare time, she enjoys spending time at the beach and hiking in her native Southern California.

  • SauceCon Speaker Profile: Jeremy Stone, Code.org

    SauceCon Speaker Profile: Jeremy Stone, Code.org

    “Moving Fast and Changing the World”— Jeremy Stone and Code.org’s mission to transform CS education and America’s STEM workforce

     As quickly as the world is changing, how can we use this momentum and proactively contribute to this change? We need to start with the basics and focus on education. Jeremy Stone, CTO of Code.org, is doing just that by teaching children how to code.

    Jeremy leads the engineering team at Code.org. His team is responsible for Code.org’s software products, including Code Studio and Hour of Code, which are focused on bringing computer science education to all schools for all kids.

    Jeremy has worked in numerous fields including edtech, cleantech, video games, high-scale online services and operating systems. He was previously VP of Engineering at Clean Power Research, where he built enterprise software products for the renewable energy industry, and prior to that he worked at Valve building games and the Steam online service. He also was a founding member of the Internet Explorer team at Microsoft.

    Computer science has never been more important, and it is never too early to start coding. The mission of the non-profit organization Code.org is exactly that—to bring computer science to all kids and increasing the participation of women and underrepresented minorities.

    Jeremy’s talk, “Moving Fast and Changing the World,” focuses on Code.org’s mission to transform computer science education and America’s STEM workforce. It will also explain why it’s important for Code.org to move fast, and why deep and sophisticated automated test investments are critical to its success. Critical for Code.org is to be able to perform automated testing on a large browser matrix, as many schools tend to run older browsers. Smarter, better and deeper automated testing is one of the key stories in the industry right now and Code.org is pushing further every year.

    “I am excited to share our stories and experiences, learn great ideas from the other talks, and then go put those ideas into practice—looking forward to us all working as a community to advance the state of the art this year,” Jeremy says.

    When Jeremy is not trying to change the world, he is helping his 9-year-old son chase his dreams by proofreading his son’s literary pieces, including the recently published novel, “I Lost My Heart in the War of 1875: A Love Story.”

    SauceCon, the first-ever Sauce Labs user conference, is a three-day event filled with training, workshops, best practices and visionary content from the leading minds in automated testing. For more on upcoming SauceCon presentations or to register, visit the SauceCon website.

    About the Author / Elizabeth Hechtel

    Elizabeth is a passionate tech writer at Sauce Labs. As a Marketing Specialist she is focusing on delivering the best quality content on mobile testing. Personally, she loves learning new languages and reading up on recent advancement of modern technology.

  • SauceCon Speaker Profile: Mike Millgate, Optum

    SauceCon Speaker Profile: Mike Millgate, Optum

    Automation architect Mike Millgate wants to work himself out of a job. Of course, he doesn’t want to make himself obsolete. He simply wants to automate testing so that QA teams can free their time to do other strategic exercises, such as exploratory testing and focus on security.

    Mike knows what he’s talking about. At Optum, a health services and innovation company, he manages a suite of tests that runs in three hours, testing 18 different applications and more than 24,000 total test cases. He is passionate about parallelization, and notes that if the tests weren’t running in parallel, they would take 55 days to run.

    At the upcoming SauceCon conference, Mike will present, “Testing at the Speed of Concurrency,” taking attendees on a journey of in-house machine testing into cloud-based testing. He will show what works and what doesn’t, and how to use parallelization to improve efficiency as the machines are increasingly doing the work.

    Mike hopes his presentation will help attendees learn how to perform massive numbers of tests in parallel, whether they are using Sauce Labs or another test platform. His mantra is, “Quality is a team effort,” and says the entire team needs to be equally invested to be successful.

    Mike has been at Optum for 15 years. As an expert in test automation in the healthcare industry, he was brought into the tech surge to help fix healthcare.gov in 2013. His work in the industry helps Optum achieve its goal: to help people live healthier lives and to help make the health system work better for everyone.

    A resident of southern Utah, Mike loves hiking and exploring nearby national parks with his family. He is passionate about foster care and adoption, having adopted three young boys with his wife. Mike also runs daily and has competed in two marathons.

    Would he say test automation is a marathon or a sprint? “If you do it right, you can get a marathon’s worth of testing done in a sprint time frame,” he says.

    Join Mike and other presenters at SauceCon, the first-ever Sauce Labs user conference. SauceCon is a three-day event filled with training, workshops, best practices and visionary content from the leading minds in automated testing. For more on upcoming SauceCon presentations or to register, visit the SauceCon website.

    About the Author / Rebecca Cramer

    Rebecca Cramer is a writer and communications strategist specializing in technology. With more than 20 years of experience across disciplines including marketing, internal and executive communications at companies such as Dell and Quest Software, Rebecca is passionate about creating and sharing good content of all kinds. In her spare time, she enjoys spending time at the beach and hiking in her native Southern California.

  • SauceCon Speaker Profile: Angie Jones, LexisNexis

    SauceCon Speaker Profile: Angie Jones, LexisNexis

    Automated tests are an important part of continuous integration, but if they’re not reliable, they can cause more problems than they solve.

    This problem is not new to Angie Jones, who works as a consultant automation engineer advising scrum teams on automation strategies and developing automation frameworks for countless software products.

    Jones currently works for LexisNexis, an information provider for legal and regulatory businesses. LexisNexis recently began embracing agile and test automation companywide, and she was brought aboard to help the company master the change. She is consulting with multiple teams to help define their automation strategy, building automation frameworks and training their testers on automation techniques.

    The biggest challenge so far has been finding different implementation strategies for different teams. “Automation strategies are not one-size-fits-all and should be customized for a given context,” she says.

    Jones will bring her expertise to the upcoming SauceCon event and plans to present a talk titled, “The Build That Cried Broken: Building Trust in Your Continuous Integration Tests.” Her presentation will focus on automated tests that are part of a continuous integration process. These tests aren’t run privately on someone’s local machine, and the person running them simply gives a final verdict to the team and spares everyone the glitches and hiccups. In CI, the unreliability of these tests are exposed for all to see, and they are detrimental to the process.

    In her talk, Jones will share how her team managed to turn their CI builds from an untrustworthy mess to a credible source of information. Since this isn’t a quick fix with a lot of cultural and mindset changes, she will discuss that as well.

    She is very excited to give this talk at SauceCon because “people attending this conference are the ones who are invested in ensuring that they get CI right, and I want them to know that automated tests don’t have to be their downfall. Besides that, it’s a really fun talk that I think everyone will enjoy,” she says.

    As a Master Inventor, Jones is known for her innovative and out-of-the-box thinking style which has resulted in 22 patented inventions in the United States and China. Angie shares her wealth of knowledge by blogging at angiejones.tech, speaking and teaching internationally at software conferences, serving as an adjunct college professor of Computer Programming and teaching tech workshops to young girls through TechGirlz and Black Girls Code. When she is not inventing something or helping people with test automation, she is reading urban fiction or soul line dancing!

    Join her and other presenters at SauceCon, the first-ever Sauce Labs user conference. SauceCon is a three-day event filled with training, workshops, best practices and visionary content from the leading minds in automated testing. For more on upcoming SauceCon presentations or to register, visit the SauceCon website.

    About the Author / Elizabeth Hechtel

    Elizabeth is a passionate tech writer at TestObject. As a Junior Marketing Manager she is focusing on delivering the best quality content on mobile testing. Personally, she loves learning new languages and reading up on recent advancement of modern technology.

  • SauceCon Speaker Profile: Adam Carmi, CTO of Applitools

    SauceCon Speaker Profile: Adam Carmi, CTO of Applitools

    Carmi to present a live coding session on testing responsive sites 

    Testing responsive sites and applications can be quite a challenge for development teams. We are fortunate to have Adam Carmi, CTO of Applitools, presenting a session at SauceCon on “Advanced Test Automation Techniques for Responsive Apps and Sites.”

    During Adam’s presentation, the audience will participate in a live coding session to learn how to effectively design responsive page objects, implement generic tests that work for all the layouts of their apps, control the browser’s viewport size to accurately target layout transition points, incorporate layout-specific assertions in their tests, and visually validate the correctness of their app’s layout​.

    Adam is passionate about everything related to software development and testing and is excited to share his knowledge with (and also learn from) similarly passionate practitioners.

    As CTO and co-founder at Applitools, a cloud service for automated visual testing, Adam spends most of his time developing image processing algorithms. However, he loves testing of all sorts, from designing the product to maximize testability to unit and API testing and, of course, automated visual testing.

    Adam regularly speaks about software testing at conferences around the world and organizes the Israeli Selenium Meetup group. He loves to ski and tries to stand on his hands as much as he can! When not working, he enjoys working out, watching movies and playing video games with his two children.

    SauceCon, the first-ever Sauce Labs user conference, is a three-day event filled with training, workshops, best practices and visionary content from the leading minds in automated testing. For more on upcoming SauceCon presentations or to register, visit the SauceCon website.

    About the Author / Rebecca Cramer

    Rebecca Cramer is a writer and communications strategist specializing in technology. With more than 20 years of experience across disciplines including marketing, internal and executive communications at companies such as Dell and Quest Software, Rebecca is passionate about creating and sharing good content of all kinds. In her spare time, she enjoys spending time at the beach and hiking in her native Southern California.