Lecture: Customizing Jenkins @ SiteSpect

What happens when a favorite open-source tool is stretched beyond its limit and needs severe customization? Two automation engineers at SiteSpect, Dustin Masterson and Josh Shapiro, talked Wednesday evening at the AutoTestCentral - Boston meetup about the problems they faced --- and solution they came up with -- when forcing Jenkins to run 350+ functional test scenarios comprising over 550,000 tests.

The following is compiled from my hastily scribbled notes, and a heck of a lot of late night last minute independent research. Please let me know in the comments section what needs to be fixed. 

Learning Java

These past couple of months while I was searching for my next software testing gig, I strangely found myself with too little hands-on programming experience. Normally, my degrees and knowledge of the software development industry would be enough... but I found out when I was interviewing that no longer could I as a Software Quality Assurance Engineer get away with simply documenting test cases in MS Word or MS Excel. Executing all the test cases by hand just like the end user of our web or mobile app was not enough. Nowadays, it seems, a QA Engineer is expected to know how to write automated tests in Selenium with Java or Python.