The opening TestHeads Meet Up of 2020 was a roaring success, with a cheerful crowd in attendance on Tuesday evening. The meet up proved an enjoyable and educational one, with audience and presenters engaging throughout the swift but hugely useful evening. Special thanks to Workday who very generously hosted and looked after the crowd with pizza and beers! Organiser Paddy Lynn welcomed the crowd and was assisted by Darryn Downey who delighted the crowd with his stand-up comedy attempts.
A first for Testheads, three topics were presented on the night; Charul Singh presented “An intro to mobile testing at Workday”, Raul Portales introduced “visual testing on mobile with Vizzy” while Sarah Graham wrapped up the evening with her topic “Hold the gherkin - a team’s journey to high performance with behaviour driven development”.
An Intro To Mobile Testing At Workday
Speaker Profile: Throughout her career, Charul Singh has spent time on testing Web apps and has started her mobile testing journey with Workday as a Cross – Platform Mobile QA. She has a passion for learning and enjoys sharing her findings and she says she is constantly learning in the Mobile testing domain and it is a lot more to it than meets the eyes.
Charul kicked off the evening and delivered an in-depth presentation on mobile testing at Workday, explaining approaches and challenges faced by mobile testers and the role of accessibility in testing. She explained the pre-commit (Functional, UI, Usability, Integration) and post-commit (Exploratory, Regression / Targeted, Integration, Sanity) strategy used by testers in Workday.
Device fragmentation was highlighted as one of the challenges faced, something testers negate with the use of Firebase and using data to tell the story. Charul closed out her presentation by touching on accessibility, and how to test for possible disabilities users may have, for example. Allowing each user to have a positive experience on site is a priority for testers and without accessibility tests, the feature cannot be released.
Visual Testing on Mobile with Vizzy
Speaker Profile: Raul Portales is a Software Engineer with a strong focus on product and quality. He switched from Symbian to Android in early 2009 (before Android versions had tasty names). After working a lot on front end – especially building games – Raul has developed a special interest in UX and UI. His current favourite topic is Playful Design. Raul was actively involved in Appsterdam and the DutchAUG. Since moving back to Dublin, he now collaborates with the Dublin GDG.
Raul presented his topic “visual testing on mobile with Vizzy”. Vizzy is an open source application by Workday available on GitHub, Rails & Docker and helps testers by creating a visual path. Introducing visual tests and how they work, Raul creatively summed up with the use of a cupcake analogy. The testing cupcake comprised of the unit test (most condensed part of the cupcake) and UI testing (the icing on the cupcake). Raul closed out by displaying Vizzy’s ease of use and capabilities with a live demo, showing how instrumentation tests allow testers take many screenshots in helping visualise a path.
Hold the Gherkin - A team’s journey to high performance with Behaviour Driven Development
Speaker Profile: Sarah Graham is an Agile Coach in Workday with over 19 years of experience in software delivery in telecoms, financial and utilities industries. Although starting life as a software engineer, with some time spent as a business analyst her main area of expertise has been quality. After a number of years as a scrum master, she now focuses her time coaching teams to high performance focusing on a number of collaboration techniques ensuring high-quality software is being delivered.
Sarah closed out the meet up and spoke about the importance of getting back to basics with BDD and how everybody could benefit by using BDD. With a focus on behaviours, her team focuses on “process driven development” and analysing of goals. Story mapping, very tactile by design, allows the team to engage, create the customer story and build from there.
By focusing on goals and conversions rather than outputs, the final outcome can be achieved without as many hiccups. Sarah closed out, saying the most important thing to remember is to have empathy and complete focus on the customer. “A satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all.”
All in all, the night provided some great insights into the processes implemented at Workday but more importantly allowed attendees to network and learn over pizza and beer. I think all agreed it was a Tuesday night well spent! Thanks again to Charul, Raul and Sarah and to Workday for their support!
Don’t miss our next TestHeads Meet Up, join or view the event here
