Selenium Meetup #28 (with Titus Fortner)

Hello everyone! Our next Meetup will take place on February 24th at the Applitools offices at 5 Shoham st., Ramat Gan (Bursa), 14th floor.

As usual we will have two presentations and plenty of time to socialize in between...

Agenda:

18:00 - 18:30 Meet & Greet
18:30 – 19:15 Running Selenium tests at scale on AWS Lambda
19:15 - 19:30 Break
19:30 - 20:15 Cucumber Turns Your Testing Into a Pickle
21:00 - Lights out

Running Selenium tests at scale on AWS Lambda

Speaker: Yarden Ingber, Applitools
(https://www.linkedin.com/in/yarden-ingber)

The challenge faced by every test automation developer is to build test suites that execute fast but are also stable and require little maintenance. We will describe a framework for executing Selenium tests using headless chrome instances running on AWS Lambda. Using this framework we can run over 5000 tests in less than 10 minutes on every build.

In this talk, we will introduce AWS lambda and show the various ways in which it can help app development, focusing on how it can be easily used to execute selenium tests at scale with zero administration overhead. We will show how this framework is implemented and how you can use it to execute any selenium project without modifying the tests.

Cucumber Turns Your Testing Into a Pickle

Speaker: Titus Fortner, Sauce Labs
(https://www.linkedin.com/in/titusfortner/)

There is a disturbing trend in the industry toward Behavior Driven Development Tools. It is easy to understand why, they come with an amazing sales pitch; usually from an agile consultant attempting to sell it to your Vice President, but the overwhelming message from the industry to managers is that it is a good and productive choice.

Unfortunately, there is a narrow path to being more successful with these tools than without them, and it is very rarely taken. What teams are left with is something that provides some of the benefits but at a significantly higher cost. If you can do BDD successfully, you probably didn’t need that particular BDD tool, and there is a lot of folly to think that your team can be successful when so few other teams are.

This talk will walk through some of the fundamental issues with BDD tooling, including why teams so often end up in trouble when using them. This will include a discussion of the ideal business process, along with the technical concerns of solving problems with regular expressions, scaling tests with BDD, and the challenges of maintaining step definitions over time.