Hotovo life, Tech corner - 30. November 2023

HOTOVO at the SANAE Software Testing BEER.EX 2023

— By Mariana Kubíková

As part of HOTOVO’s constant commitment to supporting both the personal and professional growth of those of us lucky enough to work here, my colleague and fellow-tester Martin Horny and I recently went to our capital, Bratislava, for the popular two-day testing conference, SANAE Software Testing BEER.EX 2023.

Not content with only supporting us, HOTOVO also supported the conference itself as one of the sponsors.

And, we also cooperated with SANAE earlier this year when we hosted a QA meet-up in our premises, and one of the speakers was a HOTOVO guy.

So, lots of support all round for SANAE and testing! 🙂

Now, let us share with you a bit about how it went and what we learned at the conference…

SANAE Software Testing BEER — Main stage

What are testing conferences all about?

A testing conference, in the context of software development, is an event where professionals, experts, and enthusiasts from the software testing and quality assurance (QA) fields gather to share knowledge, insights and experiences related to testing practices. These conferences provide a platform for attendees to learn about the latest trends, tools, methodologies and best practices in software testing.

The SANAE Software Testing BEER.EX 2023 conference was over two days, and included:

Keynote Presentations: Leading figures in the field who delivered keynote presentations, offering insights into the current state of software testing, emerging trends and future directions. These were split into two tracks: Inspirational themes and Technical themes.
Technical Sessions and Workshops: In-depth tutorial-like sessions where the speakers shared their knowledge on specific testing techniques, tools and methodologies

There were also booths and tables where sponsors (such as HOTOVO) laid out merchandise and giveaways, and lots of opportunities for networking and community building.

Day 1 of the conference: presentation day

The first day of the SANAE Software Testing BEER.EX 2023 conference started with the registration of all attendees. We all received a nice (or was it!?) welcome package that included a special something to “test” – have a look at the pictures below, what do you think – nice or not? ;)

Our welcome presents Something to “test” the tastebuds!

During the presentations, there were two stages with different speakers to choose between: the Inspirational track or the Technical track. On both tracks it was possible to ask the speakers questions after their presentations.

Here’s a selection of the most interesting topics we attended from both tracks:

Speakers – inspirational and technical track

Speaker: Corina Pip, Deloitte Digital (RO)

Corina is a test and automation lead, with a focus on testing by means of Java, Selenium, TestNG, Spring, Maven and other cool frameworks and tools. Previous endeavors from her 11+ years in a testing career include working on navigation devices, in the online gaming industry and in the aviation software and automotive industries.

She spoke about how testers add value to organizations, but also to ourselves. Her presentation focused on the personal growth of testers within a company, and how to avoid burnout (e.g. kicking work out of your mind after your working hours, doing hobbies or things you enjoy, spending time with friends, not pushing yourself too hard, etc).

These were her core pieces of advice for how to be the best version of yourself:

Don’t let yourself burn out
Take regular breaks
Separate your work time from your personal life
Take your days off

Speaker: Kimberly Snoyl, Capgemini (NL)

Kimberly is a senior software tester with nearly eight years of experience in testing, who’s also added the role of UX designer to her skillset since 2020. With a Master’s in Human Media Interaction, she focuses on UX testing, and runs a usability testing course for her colleagues. She is the leader of the UX Testing Guild at Capgemini.

Kimberly told us more about the importance of usability testing. Testers usually test only the product owner’s requirements, but have you ever tested user requirements? Do you think about how users see your application?

This was a very interesting and useful topic, so we’ve prepared another, separate blog going into more detail on what usability testing is, what the most important aspects of this kind of testing are, and what it looks like using real-life examples.

Check it out here:

Usability testing - the main principles

Speaker: Valentin Ranshakov, Flink (DE)

Valentin is a quality software wizard, with over a decade of experience in the fast-paced world of extreme scrum and agile environments. He’s a

master of effective software quality assurance and testing, and he’s always pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. Today, Valentin is working on the cutting edge of consumer-focused software development, building high-quality mobile apps and backends that delight millions of users.

Have you ever been frustrated with having to manage tons of regression tests? Valentin has a solution on how to reduce it.

His solutions are:

Shadow traffic
Feature flags
Beta testing

Let’s have a look at these principles in more detail:

Shadow traffic - preview changes during pre-deployment, validate the scale, ensure realistic tests by using realistic data.

Feature flags - trunk-based development, switch on/off any parts of the application, separate deploy and release.

Beta testing - use your colleagues for tests, collect data from users.

After each session there was a chance to ask the speakers anything we wanted. Someone asked the question: “What should we do if a customer doesn’t trust our tests and wants to quit?”. Valentin’s response: “Ok, let him go. A new customer will come “.

Day 2 of the conference – tutorials day

The second day of the conference was about practical skills. For me it was just like a school session or other kinds of training. Before the conference started we had to select in advance one tutorial we wanted to attend. In my previous projects, we’ve usually used Selenium with Java, and one of the first tutorials was called “The waiting game – how to design reliable Selenium tests” – so this was my choice.

The speaker was Corina Pip again, from the first presentation day.

We started with a presentation about wait times and wait methods in Selenium. Set waiting times are a very common problem for automation testers, because the waiting time has to be long enough to execute the test steps. But, if you set too big a waiting time, your automation tests will be slow and take too long.

After a short presentation, Corina then showed us practical examples from coding.

The main purpose of this tutorial was how to avoid making delays in our test or hardcoded waiting times.

Corina is a skilled automation tester so she was coding everything from scratch.

Below are a few examples of what she showed us, but I’d recommend downloading the whole project / the whole code, which is available for you to download via the public GitHub repository here:

GitHub - MarianaKubikova/WaitingTimesProjectShow

This is a useful definition of pages, via @Find By or @By patterns. As you can see from the code below, the most common locator definitions are used, like xpath, css selector, id…

java

public By passwordInput = By.id("password");

    public By shoppingCartQuantity = By.className("shopping_cart_badge");

    public By shoppingCartLink = By.className("shopping_cart_link");

    public By addButtons = By.cssSelector("[id*='add-to-cart']");

This code shows how to set your waiting time until your page will be loaded:

java

public void waitForPageLoadComplete() {

        WebDriverWait wait = new WebDriverWait(driver, Duration.ofSeconds(TIMEOUT));

        wait.until(driver -> String

                .valueOf(((JavascriptExecutor)

                        driver).executeScript("return document.readyState"))

                .equals("complete"));}

If you download the whole project you’ll be able to see some practical examples on how to solve waiting times based on different methods.

Our takeaways from the conference

Manual and automation testers are creating a nice community for the sharing of testing knowledge. It doesn't matter if you are a junior or senior tester. Attending any software testing conference can help you with your skills, motivation, career path clarity, plus there’s always the chance you’ll see or learn something new, popular or maybe even that will be revolutionary to your work!

But the most important thing, we think, is the chance to see fellow colleagues from different countries and make new friends.

Martin and Mariana with Maros Kutschy, a speaker from Ness Košice — Our takeaways from the conference