Tag Archives: conferences

Technical Mobile Testing At The Test Masters Academy Masterclasses

February 28, 2016 Stephen Janaway Leave a comment

I’m really excited to be partnering with Richard Bradshaw, a.k.a. Friendly Tester for some Technical Mobile Testing tutorials this year. The first one will be in New York as part of the Test Masters Academy Masterclasses on 25th and 26th April.

Technical Mobile Testing

Technical Mobile Testing builds on the Mobile Testing tutorial I’ve taught over the last couple of years, and is aimed at those who want to go deeper into mobile testing and get more technically focused.

If you have found yourself testing on mobile recently, you have probably considered or tried introducing some automation or tools into your testing efforts. You are probably thinking along the lines of, how can I make this easier? But it can appear a daunting task; there are so many frameworks and so many tools out there, so where do you start? In the tutorial we will try and help you answer that question.

What The Tutorial Covers

In this tutorial you will pick up useful hints and tips, learnt from within the industry. We plan to cover the following areas over the two days.

The Mobile Market and How It Affects Testing.
Why Get More Technical and How To Start.
Using Chrome Developer Tools and Safari Web Inspector to test mobile websites
Utilising XCode / iOS Simulator.
Android Virtual Devices, Emulators and Genymotion.
Getting the most out of Android Debug Bridge (ADB).
How to utilise proxying when testing mobile.
Recording your testing from the device.
Using GUI automation frameworks available.
Creating some GUI automated checks using Appium.

We’ll look at how to use simulators and emulators, simulate networks, fake locations and a whole lot more. You’ll pick-up tips on how to use the developer tools and SDKs, build apps, deploy apps to devices and view and change the network requests that apps make.

If you come along then you’ll leave with the knowledge needed to get far more technical with mobile and a great toolbox of hints and tips and hand-ons experience.

Coming Along? – What To Bring

We’ll be using the common SDK’s for iOS and Android so you’ll need to install XCode and Android Studio, and have Chrome and Safari installed. We’ll help you with the setup and get you started.

And bring devices. Lots of devices 🙂

Stay For The Conference

Test Masters Academy have a great line-up of both tutorials but they also have a one day conference on 27th April. Have a look at the line-up – there’s some really interesting stuff on the program.

Hope to see you there.

conferences, Experiences

Nordic Testing Days – Remaining Relevant

June 5, 2015 Stephen Janaway Leave a comment

A great keynote from Rob Lambert.

Here’s my notes (kinda sketch note style this morning 😀).

conferences

Nordic Testing Days – Value Sync

June 5, 2015 Stephen Janaway 1 Comment

Rob Sabourin gave a great keynote to close the first day of Nordic Testing Days. Value Sync.

Can quality products be delivered when teams, customers, users and stakeholders have conflicting values? Rob put forward the concept that the notions of “On time on quality and on budget” are meaningless concepts unless you are “on purpose”.

What do people value? Why do they value it? How does it matter?

I mindmapped the session. The mindmap is not totally complete – Rob talks fast and his slides change quickly so there were a few bits I missed, but hopefully you find it useful.

Value Sync Mindmap

conferences, Experiences

Nordic Testing Days – Weekend Testing Europe

June 4, 2015 Stephen Janaway Leave a comment

I’ve just finished watching an excellent presentation by Neil Studd about how he, Amy Phillips and Dan Billing resurrected Weekend Testing Europe.

I mind-mapped the session and I thought you might find it useful so here it is 🙂

Weekend Testing Mindmap

Hopefully you enjoy it. I’ve done a couple of Weekend Testing Sessions and really enjoyed them so I recommend everyone tries it out.

There’s much more information on Weekend Testing Europe and how to get involved here.

conferences, Eurostar, Experiences, Presenting

EuroSTAR 2014 – Day 2

December 8, 2014 Stephen Janaway 2 Comments

This is the second part of my review of EuroSTAR 2014. Check here for day 1.

Day 2

Day 2 started with Isabel Evans giving her experiences of a change project that went wrong. There was a lot of things to learn from here experiences but the main thing I took away was “it’s alway about the people”. People are the main factor in software development and the main factor in change. Understanding them if the key to effective change.

Here’s my notes from her session.

Next up I saw Michael Bolton give a very interesting and interactive session called ‘Every Tester Has a Price: Sources of Product and Project Information’. In it we went through different information sources and produced a large and detailed mindmap. I captured some of it below:

Note – it’s not complete and I need to get the rest of it from Michael.

Following Michael’s session I caught Kristoffer Nordström’s session on Gameification. This was a great personal account of how Kristoffer introduced gameification to a project he was working on, and what the results were. Certainly something that I’d like to see if I can use where I work.

My final session of the morning was another case study, this time from James Christie. James gave a very detailed and interesting study of a project he worked on for the UK government, whose primary goal seemed to be for the project not to appear in the UK news/ satire magazine Private Eye. While the project did not fail, (the programme it was part of did), it placed a great strain on the people involved and certainly was not the sort of project James would want to be involved with again. There were some clear lessons to learn, hopefully captured in my notes below.

After lunch it was my turn to talk about “Understanding Your Mobile User”. I was lucky, I had a good audience and they asked some great questions.

I spoke about ways you could understand mobile users, and why understanding the user is so important when mobile testing.

The final keynote of the day was from Julian Harty, who spoke about ‘Software Talk: Are We Listening’. Julian gave us some hints and tips on how we can listen to software, through analytics for example.

What happened next was a little bizarre. A guy from Smartbear got up on the stage and sang a song about testing, to the tune (and inspired by the lyrics) of Frozen, the Disney kids film. Not my cup of tea but some people enjoyed it I guess.

Then it was time for the Gala party – a great night at Croke Park, home of the GAA.

Note: Updated 11th Dec as a result of James’ comment below.

conferences, Eurostar, Testing

EuroSTAR 2014 – Day 1

December 2, 2014 Stephen Janaway 1 Comment

I didn’t know what to expect from this year’s EuroSTAR conference. I’d only been once before, and so I wasn’t sure how much a different programme chair and committee, and a new venue itself would make a difference to the EuroSTAR experience. In addition I had the added pressure of being lucky enough to speak at the conference as well.

Fortunately none of the changes made a difference. It was a great conference, with some excellent speakers, fun things to do when the talks weren’t happening, and lots of opportunity to meet old friends and make new one’s. Paul Gerrard, the programme committee and the EuroSTAR conference organisers did a great job booking a varied programme and a well organised event.

Prologue

I arrived in Dublin on Sunday which meant that I was able to make it along to the early registration. This is a great idea which I hope happens next year, as well as being able to pick-up all the usual conference materials, T-shirt, etc early to save queuing, it also meant that those of us who had arrived early could easily get out and meet people. I had a great discussion with a couple of guys from Ericsson which brought back memories of my earlier career there. I was then lucky enough to bump into a number of people I knew as well. Dinner with Declan O’Riordan and Karen Johnson then followed, at which we had some excellent discussions about testing, contracting and life in general.

IMG_20141123_180430 — The conference centre looked very impressive

I spent Monday sightseeing. As an ex Nokian it was great to see this 🙂

IMG_20141124_092610 — Someone really needs to update their advertising…

Day 1

Day 1 started with the keynote from Andy Stanford-Clark. I really enjoyed it and it certainly made me think more about the Internet of Things, and the challenge it causes for testers. And also how I could automate my house 🙂

I followed this up with Amy Phillips talk about Testing In the World of Start-ups. I’ve recently started working with a team who are effectively in start-up mode and it was very useful to hear Amy’s experiences from Songkick. The main thing I took away was that the testers role within a start-up is very different to a larger company, with a more varied skill-set required and potentially less actual testing. I feel this is the way that testing is going these days anyway, slowly but surely.

My next session was from Rikard Edgren who presented about Trying To Teach Testing Skills and Judgement. It was an excellent talk, dealing with Rikard’s experience of training testers. He’s also produced a white paper with a lot more detail, that I’m going to read.

The final keynote of the day was from Rob Lambert. Rob talked about Continuous Delivery and DevOps and gave us his experiences from New Voice Media. It was a good talk and built upon previous talks I’ve seen Rob do, giving more detail.

Here’s my notes from the session.

Then it was time to learn how to pour some Guinness 🙂

IMG_20141125_185014 — Well we are in Dublin after all…

conferences, Experiences, mobile

I’m at Mobile App Europe – Day 3

October 1, 2014 Stephen Janaway 4 Comments

Time for the last day of Mobile App Europe.

The final keynote – The 7 Deadly Sins of Mobile Apps from Jonathan Kohl.

Saurabh Agarwal is now talking about ‘Tackling Fragmentation in the Mobile App World’.

Marc C Lange gave a really interesting presentation called ‘How to Slim Down Product Management, Gain Valuable Insights and Make Customers Early by Leaving Your Comfort Zone’. He gave some excellent tips on how to understand users and how to consider mobile prototyping. I mindmapped his session.

A really interesting presentation on Appium from Andreas Ludeke. He even did some live coding – a brave man – which worked! I did a little mindmap of the session.

First up – Julien Lesaicherre talking about Building the Future of Mobile Apps With Facebook. I mindmapped the session and you can find my map here.

Julien’s slides are here.

conferences, Experiences, mobile, Presenting, Testing

I’m At Mobile App Europe – Day 2

September 30, 2014 Stephen Janaway Leave a comment

So it’s day 2. I’ll be blogging as much as I can, scroll down for the earlier sessions.

Dr Cheahan So talking about Why We Are Wrong When We Think We Are Right.

Next up – Peter Varhol, who is talking about Mobile Apps and the Role of Load Testing. Here’s my mindmap.

Stefan Gwihs and Philipp Strelka talked about the use of emulators and simulators in mobile testing.

Some interesting stuff, particularly about how a test approach should not be purely UI driven. My mindmap is here.

First the keynote. Unfortunately Daniel Knott couldn’t make it – fortunately he put his slides up on slideshare.

Everything is not lost 🙂 – we have a new keynote – Mobile App Quality at Paypal.

conferences, Experiences, mobile, Presenting

I’m At Mobile App Europe – Day 1

September 29, 2014 Stephen Janaway 1 Comment

I’m at the Mobile App Europe conference in Potsdam.

This morning I gave my presentation ‘Mobile Testing, That’s Just a Smaller Screen, Right?’ – you can get the slides on slideshare.

I’m here for the rest of the conference and I’ll try and mindmap a few sessions.

Martin Wrigley is now talking about ‘Effective QA – Is It Really Necessary?’ Hint, yes it is 🙂

This afternoon I spent some time in Bill Matthew’s Security Testing Workshop. I mindmapped his slides.

Next Up – Christian Kaar from Runtastic with 10 Ingredients to Rock the App Store with Your App. Here’s my mindmap.

The first one is ‘All Together Now – Apps for the Next Platform: Making Watches, Wearables and Web Work’ which was presented by Lars Kamp. A very interesting and informative presentation about wearables.