Tag Archives: experience report

KWST 2015

Just a follow up on the 2015 Kiwi Workshop on Software Testing (Aug 2015). Find my write-up here:

http://www.associationforsoftwaretesting.org/2015/10/11/grant-program-kwst2015/

KWST 2015

In attendance this year were:
James Bach, Oliver Erlewein, Richard Robinson, Aaron Hodder, Sarah Burgess, Andy Harwood, Adam Howard, Mark Boyt, Chris Priest, Mike Talks, Joshua Raine, Scott Griffiths, John Lockhart, Sean Cresswell, Rachel Carson, Till Neunast, James Hailstone, David Robinson and Katrina Clokie

by
Oliver Erlewein

KWST 2014

A late report from our workshop last year. I stumbled across it again in my preparations for KWST (Kiwi Workshop on Software Testing) 2015. It was supposed to be published through our gracious sponsor, The Association for Software Testing (AST), but it never eventuated. So I thought I’d post it here. Better late than never.

So here goes….

For the fourth year in a row, Wellington (New Zealand) has successfully hosted the Kiwi Workshop on Software Testing. The two-day intensive testing workshop is one of the key drivers of the Context-Driven Testing (CDT) community Down Under.

In its beginnings, the aim was to give the experienced and senior community members a platform to drive innovation and exchange ideas. The impact of KWST in the community over these past years has had far reaching effects in New Zealand as well as Australia.

Workshops, conferences, and magazines have emerged since, which have lifted the game right across the board. KWST 2014 was specifically aimed at involving new faces in the community and not drawing as much on the established KWST crowd.

The topic this year was:

“How to speed up testing? – and why we shouldn’t”

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CITCON Auckland 2014

So, CITCON Auckland (http://www.citconf.com/) is over and what a blast it was!

What I really like about this conference is, that there is such a diversity of people coming to it. It is not the usual siloed Dev/Test/BA/… type conference but attendees come from all over. That means the know-how is totally diverse, as are the topics. And these were the topics (click on the pic to get the full res version): CITCON_AKL_Program

 

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KWST#3

The Association for Software Testing (AST) has this year funded large parts of KWST. So I wrote a report for them on what we did. I thought I’d share here too.

The Third Kiwi Workshop on Software Testing

by Oliver Erlewein

KWST#3 Attendees

KWST#3 Attendees

It’s winter in the southern hemisphere: The weather is getting cold and windy, and people are staying inside.  But not all! Testers from all over Australia and New Zealand were flocking to one of the testing highlights of the year, the two day long Kiwi Workshop on Software Testing (KWST) held in Wellington, New Zealand.

This is the third time round and we’re going from strength to strength. This time 19 people were sharing their experiences – LAWST style – about “Lighting the way; Educating others and ourselves about software testing”.

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WeTest Workshop #1

Last week (25.10.2012) the first WeTest Meetup Workshop was held in Wellington. This is a Meetup group that meets loosely bi-monthly and conforms to the same experience report style as KWST, OZWST and LAWST does.

Needless to say the event, instigated by Aaron Hodder, Katrina Edgar and Brian Osman, was quite a success. The topic was “Experiances in Test Automation”. Discussion was lively and there was lots to take home & think about. Read up on the details in these blog posts:

Assurity BLOG

TestSheep NZ

Thanks go to Assurity for helping fund the venue, food and drinks! Also thanks to everyone there for the great participation. The next Workshop will be on the 6th of December. Places are filling up quickly.

Author: Oliver Erlewein

Sikuli – for all those hard to reach places!

Ever had the scenario in automated testing, that you had something to automate that really didn’t fit any of your tools? Something that was as bristly as an Echidnea?

Normally I try and steer away from anything that doesn’t use standard protocols and/or interfaces. Things like Flash, Silverlight and others. Not that there aren’t test tools that handle these things but it’s just that it’s messy to say the least. For open standards like HTML or SOAP there are gazillions of ways to automate.

So I got surprised by having to test an application on -or should I rather say through- Citrix.

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Test Script Madness: Is there any value of documenting test scripts after execution

I spoke with a tester recently about capturing tests to be reused. I had a discussion with them on what they thought about the process. I will outline their task, what they were supposed to do, what they did, and the questions and comments that came from the discussion afterwards. Some valuable lessons and insight were uncovered.

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Thoughts on Performance Testing in NZ

I’ve spent the last couple of years helping projects with their application performance in NZ (mainly Wellington). I thought it’s about time I wrote something on the experiences I’ve had during that time and the lessons learned.

NZ is comparatively a smallish place. 4.5m people live here. A large bank for example has about 0.5-0.75m customers. One of the biggest online applications running in NZ is probably TradeMe. They have 2.8m customers and about 75k-200k active customers at any point in time. On average they have less than 1m logins a day. If I contrast that to large international systems this is laughable. Ebay for instance has 83m users and  670 million page views a day (I don’t know from when these figures are though). Facebook has 750m users,…. So big international companies talk about building another datacenter, where we might start clustering.

We do things a bit smaller. That has its advantages – if we do our homework correctly. Most products used nowadays are designed to be massively scalable to the requirements of large international companies. So we should have no issues with performance….EVER!

But as you probably know from your own surfing experience this is not always the case. It gets even worse when we use web applications that are in-house. All of this should actually be a no-brainer. So what’s going wrong?

I’ll try and list the thoughts and experiences that I see are common in projects here (no particular order).

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