Building software is fun. Spending countless hours or even days on something to get it finally working. Helping someone who uses your software to speed-up the daily workflow. All that is fantastic and every developer loves that. But don’t let the dark side come up, when customers are pointing you to a lot of software defects. Are you still proud and will you continue the work as how you did it before?
Most likely not. Or well, lets say at least not when quality is what you want to ship. So you will start to think about how to test your application. You can do a lot of manual testing based on test plans or just do exploratory testing. That will work as long as your application is not complex enough, and can be done in a couple of minutes. But once you have to do the same kind of steps over and over again for each release, you will find it boring and loose the interest or concentration on it. Failures will happen so that issues slip through your testing, and bugs becoming part of the new release.
That’s indeed something you eventually want to kill in the future. But how? There is an easy answer to this question! Use test automation! Create tests for each feature you implement, or regression you got fixed. Over time the enlarged suite of tests will make you happy, given that you have to spend nearly no time on manual tests, and have results in a split of the time needed before. Releasing new versions of the application can be done much faster.
At some point, when your application is large enough, you might even not work alone anymore on that product. There will be other developers, or even software testers whose job is to plan and execute the testing strategy. Given that in the past there was not such a high demand on automation knowledge for them, the requirements for jobs have been changed in the past months. So lesser companies will hire engineers for quality assurance who do not have a coding background. This is hard for them, given that it can take ages to find a new position. Something has to change for them.
We, the Firefox Automation team at Mozilla want to help out here. Given our knowledge in automation for various Mozilla related projects, our goal is to support interested people in gaining their knowledge in software development and especially test automation. Therefor we are planning to have automation trainings on a regular basis. And all based on our own projects, so you will have the chance to practice all the new things, which you have learned. All that indeed depends on the acceptance for that offer, and the number of participants.
The first two training days will happen on March 24th and 26th, and will mainly take place in our #automation channel on IRC. Given that we have no idea how many of you will join us during that day, and what your knowledge is, we will start with the basics. That means we will guide you through courses of Javascript, Python, HTML, or CSS. We will collect your feedback and extend the etherpad for automation trainings to finally have a wonderful list of getting started tutorials.
For those of you who already have more experience, we will offer tasks to work on depending on your skills and directions. Please see the before mentioned etherpad for areas of work and appropriate mentors. We will guarantee that it will be fun!
We would love to see you next week, and if you have questions, don’t hesitate to ask here, or in the automation mailing list.
Henrik Skupin: Join our first Automation Training days on March 24/26, http://t.co/6dZjO0B0pG
[moz] Henrik Skupin: Join our first Automation Training days on March 24/26 http://t.co/uLxsTMBgfv
Henrik Skupin: Join our first Automation Training days on March 24/26 http://t.co/2csi1mITg4
#Planet ยป Henrik Skupin: Join our first Automation Training days on March 24/26 http://t.co/yI6ifPrwQh
Please can you tell me what time this training is being held using GMT?
Hi Fady. The training will take place the whole day. We will have moderators nearly all the time in Europe and America. So stop by whenever you can. Looking forward to talk to you.
#mozillians #mozilla Join our first Automation Training days on March 24/26 http://t.co/tGZykIUpVg @mozillareps @MozillaCH @MozillaGreece
Join Automation Training Days on 24th & 26th March – http://t.co/WtPaPuDsdU
Etherpad: https://t.co/SQVYPy9CRm
@mozilla @firefox #MozPk