September 2013 QASIG Meeting

Human-Scale Test Automation

Presented by: Michael Hunter, Senior SDET, Microsoft

Recently presented at CAST 2013, Michael will give a modified version of his workshop, Human-Scale Test Automation – with audience guidance and input.

Michael has spent the last ten years implementing automation stacks of one form or another. Most of them have been useful. Some have even continued until be useful after he left the team. In helping all these teams converge on a stack that works for them, Michael found two constants: every stack is different, and finding the right stack is hard!

All those implementation details get in the way, even when confident we’ve abstracted them all away. In this workshop we’ll experience this firsthand: we’ll figure out the “right” set of customer actions, implement them in an automation stack where we are the various components, and then execute a few test cases and see what we learn.

About our speaker: While studying architecture in Chicago, IL, I took an internship updating CAD drawings at a major Chicago bank. My desire to make the computer do most of the work turned that internship into a full-time job writing applications for the CAD system as well as for other areas of the bank. At the same time, a major CAD company was looking for people fluent in both CAD and programming – a perfect fit with my experience. The collaboration proved fruitful for both parties; I found lots of issues with the APIs, and the expertise I developed with those APIs led to my first published articles.

My work on AutoCAD brought me a job offer from a competitor and my first full-time testing job. A later acquisition of that company by Microsoft made me a Microsoftie, and I’m somewhat bemused to have now spent thirteen years helping Microsoft test better.

My “You Are Not Done Yet” checklist and other good stuff are at https://www.thebraidytester.com.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Scroll to top
Close Bitnami banner
Bitnami