I am super excited to announce that the DevOpsCon Singapore conference is finally here and I am elated to be a part of the Speaker lineup!
After cancellations and rescheduling in 2020 due to the pandemic, this grand event is finally happening now from 22 to 25 Nov 2021 in an online edition.
My talk that was slated to be part of the 2020 edition remains the same topic which I have worked to enhance this year. Here are a few details of the session –
Title – The What, When and How of Test Automation
Description
Agile means pace and agile means change. With frequent time-boxed releases and flexible requirements, test automation faces numerous challenges. Haven’t we all asked what to automate and how to go about the daily tasks with the automation cloud looming over our heads? Here, we’ll discuss answers to some of these questions and try to outline a number of approaches that agile teams can take in their selection of what to automate, how to go about their automation, whom to involve, and when to schedule these tasks so that the releases are debt-free and of the best quality.
What to automate: regression averse approach, selective approach, sanity automation, max automation approach
When to automate: sprint n-1 approach, continuous automation
How to automate – all-hands approach, shared automation expert, code-averse tool
Let us have a look at the integration of these possibilities, the possible combinations, and what may or may not work.
My session will be held live on Monday, November 22 2021 17:00 – 17:45 SGT
To check out my speaker and session details, click here
For the detailed program and agenda of the conference, see this page
To Register for the event and related details, click here
I was recently invited by Fabian Böck for a chat over on his Youtube channel where he frequently interviews people in tech on various topics of interest in the industry. My talk was focused on how to steer the direction of your tech career. We had a fantastic talk about how to pave learning avenues, set for yourself time to reflect, and how companies should be enabling their workforce. And most importantly, how to ‘Never Feel Stuck’ in where you are – even if you are happy or not and use continuous learning and self improvement to guide yourself to better places!
Here is a link to the video interview-
Fabian’s company Boeck and XOXO works on Tech Conventions x Matchmaking Marketplace x Tech Talks. Check them out for more interesting talks and content!
I was invited to take a MasterClass by the wonderful people at the Ministry of Testing last month. They had a ‘Communities’ theme going on for the month of June 2021 and they loved my talk idea about Leveraging Tech Communities. So we worked around that theme to create a talk on “Grow your Career with Tech Communities”
I am super excited to share that I have been invited to speak at the upcoming WomenTech Global Conference – The Largest Conference for Women in Tech!
Scheduled for June 7-11 2021, this virtual conference will bring women in tech, minorities and allies from all over the world together through an interactive platform platform featuring live ceremonies, keynotes, engaging panels, breakout rooms, country & chapter leader sessions, technical workshops, and networking with face-to-face sessions. Bringing together +100000 women in tech from 181 countries hosting 500+ speakers and mentors! https://www.womentech.net/women-tech-conference
My session will be on “The Power of Tech Communities”
Check out my speaker page and session details here :
In my talk, I will discuss how we can leverage the power of tech communities in our career and personal growth? And since nothing drives a brand forward more than its community! So, how can companies create and leverage such tech communities to their product’s advantage and to delight their users.
My company @Sahi Pro was a proud sponsor and Exhibitor at the Selenium Day Event organised by 1.21GWs on 30-31st Jan 2020 at Bengaluru, where I was involved in a number of ways-
>I presented a talk on “Layered Approach to Test Automation”
Presenting My Talk at Selenium Day
>Sahi Pro team had put up a demo booth with engaging discussions, quiz and goodies for the attending delegates
Team demonstrating Sahi Pro at the Booth
>I also got to organize and host a fun and engaging Testing Olympiad Finale at the event! The event team had organised on online quiz followed by a Semi-Final round in the day of the event. The finalists were the 4 teams selected base don their performance and @Sahi Pro was tasked with creating a suitable finale to select the Best Testing Team.
I got to work and wracked my brain on how best to create the quiz such that it is suited for the varied levels and profiles of participating test personnel, does justice to their knowledge and is a fair ground for all, and is fun and engaging not only for the delegates but also for the audience. I came up with 5 rounds conducted in a stage show style format , each very different and relevant to diff areas like 1) Testing fundamentals – On the Clock 2) Attention-to-Detail- Buzzer round that checks Tester’s key skills 3)DevOps & Test automation round 4) Audio – Visual Round and 5) Rapid Fire round for the top 3 teams.
Our Sahi Pro team helped me conduct the quiz beautifully by keeping time, managing the score-boards and helping with the audience questions. This sure was the highlight of the day for not only the finalist participants but also the audience as they got a chance to win exciting Sahi Pro goodies!
Me hosting the Testing Olympiad Finale
The winners were announced after a thrilling contest comprising 5 rounds of Testing fundamentals, DevOps & Automation round, Audi-visual round, Attention to detail and the final Rapid Fire Round! The details of the winners have been announced here too – https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6629658639214972928/
We felicitated the winners along with 1.21GWs organising team and ended the day with some cool pictures as memories of the grand day!
Felicitating the Winners
I learnt a lot while preparing the quiz, talking to my peers and friends on improving it, collating feedback and improving it over a course of 3 weeks. I also enjoyed conducting the event as a host – keeping the energy alive, engaging audiences, cheering & motivating participants and keeping it fair at all times! I am excited to say we received such great feedback and kudos from the organisers for putting up a great show! #Grateful
Looking forward to many more great events in 2020! 🙂
I was invited to speak at the DevOps and Agile testing Summit organised and conducted by 1.21GWs on 8th Nov 2019 at Bangalore. It was a great event which brought together many keen minds as delegates and many inspiring speakers. https://1point21gws.com/devops/bangalore/
My talk was on “The Building Blocks of a Robust Test Automation Strategy”. As we know testing teams are faced with a number of questions, decisions and challenges throughout their test automation journey. But there is no single solution for their varied problems! In this talk I outlined a number of strategies that agile teams can follow– be it their selection of what to automate and how much, what approaches to follow, whom to involve, and when to schedule these tasks so that the releases are of best quality.
I am grateful that my talk was so well received and led to great discussions later with many participants. I enjoyed the day and am always glad to be invited by the 1.21GWs team.
A peek into the event – pictures from my session
@Sahi Pro was also a knowledge partner at the event and delegates also got a peek into Sahi Pro via video and brochure handouts.
I am back from the trip to Canada which followed the big day that was #TQ2019. So, I finally have a chance to share my experiences. This event https://kwsqa.org/tq2019/schedule/ organised by KWSQA was special in a number of ways-
It was my first international conference talk 🙂
I was one of the few international speakers at the conference, and the one who traveled the farthest for it!
I was the only speaker presenting 2 talks!
The travel was big too – with tonnes of visa processing, a 24 hour long flight to Toronto and then a bus ride from Toronto to Cambridge (which I nearly missed 😛 owing to the infamous Toronto traffic! )
Day 1 of the event was workshops that were in progress when we reached and we got a chance to informally meet the organizers at the desk. That evening they had planned a Speaker dinner which was a great idea. I got to interact and meet with all the speakers, made some friends and so the next day seemed a little less daunting having so many known faces.
24 Sep was the big conference day. Staying at the same hotel gave me the advantage to get ready at my own pace and be on time for the breakfast. The event began with a brief intro and then split into tracks. The first talk I attended was ‘Lean Coffee Facilitators Training’ by Matt Heusser. My first time hearing him speak. His session was fun and engaging and practical. I did #sketchnotes for the talk and also participated in the activity which was fun!
After that was my own session in the next room, so I hurried to setup and get ready. The best part was that the organisers had planned a 15 minutes gap between each talk for QA/Networking which gave the speakers and the delegates some breathing room and time to get to other sessions.
I talked on ‘The What, When and How of Test Automation’ which was a 45 minutes session. The room was full and there were lots of good questions and participation from the audience. I did feel that I handled it well and the topic as well as the proposed ideas were well received! 🙂 Here are a few glimpses into my talk-
Though I was relieved having just delivered a good talk, I still had one more to go! After that was lunch hour. A few participants from my talk invited me to sit at their table and we had so many discussions about work, testing as well as my travel plans 😛
Then we got back to talks- I also attended a talk on ‘Barriers in Accessibility Testing’ by Albert Gareev which I also #sketchnoted
Post that I rushed to the lightning talks track as I had to prepare for my next talk that was a 15 minute session on ‘Gamify your Agile Workplace’. As I got there I heard Richard Strang talk about ‘Implementing an Agile QA Guild’ and his experiences that were so varied and interesting. Then I got up to speak and since I was talking about an innovation game called speed boat, I had to first draw a big speed boat on the flipchart (with my limited drawing skills:P ) with a room full of people staring! I guess I managed well as the room MC Tina Fletcher (also president of KWSQA) was impressed with my masterpiece 😛 hehe
The session went well – the best bit being our Keynote speaker Damian Synadinos attending as well volunteering for the little game we played. It was an honor and an unforgettable experience. I hope the audience took back something tangible to try out gamification in their agile teams.
With both the talks done, it was now time to relax and network. I stopped by the booths by Oracle and NPM, chatted with fellow speakers and delegates, the organizers and also got real time feedback from the attendees who chose to attend my sessions.
Post the little coffee break was the grand closing keynote by Damian and it really was an experience. He mentioned in his intro that he had some improv experience and he really uses it to the best in his speaking! The talk was funny, intriguing, had loads of content, memorable quotes as well as an activity in which I volunteered! And a big Plus — Damian mentioned me and my talk too! 🙂 🙂 All in all it was an epic performance and really inspiring as a speaker. Kudos to the effort that went behind putting this together.
The best parts were getting to know so many wonderful people like Josh, Bailey and Dani, and getting to meet @Matt Heuser who I have had the chance to work with online. A face-to-face interaction makes things seem so real and people so approachable. He is a gem of a person and so encouraging too. I also made a friend @Emna who came from Tunisia to speak at the event! We roamed the streets of Cambridge and rode buses together and by the end seemed like we have known each other for so long. I surely hope to see her again at a future conference.
The organizers at TQ2019 had really worked hard and their efforts worked out so well with such a grand event pulled off with great ease, smooth flow and right on schedule. They welcomed us with warmth and helped throughout the day. At the end of the day we all got some time to cool off with a Social event where we mingled and got a chance to express our gratitude and say good byes. I would like to personally thank Greame Harvey, Sabina, Rob, Josh Assad ,Jared and Tina Fletcher from the KWSQA committee who were all so helpful and kind.
I am thankful for getting this opportunity and look forward to staying connected with such awesome people. I am also thankful for my supporting hubby who tagged along so that we could make this into a trip – got a chance to explore Toronto, Montreal and Quebec city and of course the majestic Niagara Falls! 🙂
I was invited to speak at the Selenium Day event in Bangalore on 31st Jan 2019.
I presented a 1 hour workshop about Selenium-Cucumber Integration and showcased it with a short demo. The session was received well and greatly appreciated by the audience.
The day was filled with lots of engaging conversations and learning from other speakers and sessions.
Most test teams today are struggling to find better ways to handle their testing. With the advent of Agile in our software development processes, teams are perennially under pressure to provide faster releases without lowering their standards of quality. This, in turn, adds load on the in-house test teams to ensure finding more and crucial issues and to prevent defect leakage. For this reason, testers look at strategies and practices that can help them achieve their goals and add more value to the product’s quality.
In my opinion as a hands-on agile tester, there is no single silver bullet to quality, but a combination of different types and approaches to testing that can help us get closer to our quality goals. Test teams need to strategize and plan the usage of a combination of scripted tests, automated tests as well as exploratory tests for achieving an optimum coverage and best quality software.
Here is my latest article for PractiTest QA Learning Centre where I discuss the need to have a combination of scripted, automated as well as exploratory tests for an optimum QA coverage–
When we look at the typical test approach, it begins with test scripting and designing tests as per software functionality. These are created using requirement analysis and test design techniques and also using common sense and skills by our skilled testers. These scripted tests form the starting point of testing a new feature, change or addition in the software.
Automated Testing
In addition to running the scripted tests manually, testers also rely on automated tests. These tests are scripted using various test automation tools and test automation, i.e. ability to write these automated test scripts is, thus, a much-wanted skill nowadays for all test professionals. The ability to run some tests using automated scripts helps repeatability and saves a lot of time and effort on part of the test teams. But most importantly, by automating the drudgery away, it saves the tester from repeated manual laborious tests and frees up their time for more creative thinking and exploration around the application.
Exploratory Testing
Exploration of software is basically looking at the feature/functionality/change and overall behavior from a learning as well as a critical standpoint. Exploratory Testing is a crucial aspect of software testing, which almost every tester performs knowingly or subconsciously.
Cem Kaner coined the term Exploratory Testing in his book “Testing Computer Software” and described it as:
“Simultaneous test design, test execution and learning with an emphasis on learning”
I was recently invited to speak at the World Quality Summit 2017 organised by UNICOM at The Leela Palace, Bangalore. The event saw attendees from many teams from Pune, Gurgaon and the city itself who participated in the Quality Olympiad. It was a good mix of audience and lots of interesting talks and discussions during the sessions.
I spoke on the Practical risks in Agile teams and Ways how testers can help build-in continuous quality in Agile projects.It was a great experience, met some great people and enthusiastic teams and got awarded the Thought leadership Certificate by UNICOM!
testwithnishi 