Adventures in Automation is One Year Old!

Adventures in Automation is now one year old!

What a difference a year makes. When I started this blog a year ago, I was still just another unemployed manual QA Engineer attempting to make the transition to automation. It had been ten years since I studied Software Engineering back in grad school. Could I convince an employer to hire me as an automated tester, if I could prove that I knew my stuff in regards to quality assurance? I had taken a few online courses in WebDriver and posted some code samples to GitHub. Would that be enough?



My wife suggested I transfer all my research notes into a blog, and "Adventures in Automation" was born!

Although I found a position at Fitbit-Boston in March 2015 as an automation developer, I've continued to post to it every week, in order to further deepen my understanding, toying with various concepts.

Let me take you on a grand tour of what you can find here...

Software Quality Assurance

I've been working as a Software Quality Assurance Engineer since the mid-1990s. In this section, I talk about the Waterfall and Agile software development methodologies, and how software testing has changed over the years.

• What is a QA Engineer? (1/24/2015)
• Waterfall & QA (1/26/2015)
• Before Waterfall (1/26/2015)
• Agile Software Development (1/30/2015)
• How Google Tests Software, thoughts on the book (1/31/2015)
• Shifts in Software Testing (2/1/2015)
• How to Switch Careers in the Software Industry (4/20/2015)
• Should You Have A Dedicated Automation Team in Your QA Team? (9/9/2015)
• Are QA Engineers Becoming Extinct? (9/28/2015)

WebDriver, Java, and other coding languages

I've also been collecting information on Selenium WebDriver, Java, and other programming languages as I have been transitioning from being a manual tester to an automation engineer.

Selenium WebDriver

• A bit about Selenium WebDriver (2/7/2015)
• SeConf2014: Q & A with the Selenium Committers (2/13/2015)
• SeConf2014: Fishbowl with the Selenium Committers (2/18/2015)
• How Fitbit-Boston sets up an automation development environment (4/15/2015) 
• Notes on Jason Huggins lecture: Fixing Healthcare.Gov, one test at a time (4/27/2015)
• Spotlight On: Dave Haeffner (6/9/2015)
• Selenium WebDriver is now on GitHub (6/26/2015)
• Anton Angelov, Design Patterns in Automation (8/12/2015)
• SeConf2015 is Going On Now! (9/9/2015)
• SeConf2015 Videos Have Been Posted (9/21/2015)
• SeConf2015: Notes from Simon Stewart's Keynote (9/26/2015)
• Fitbit-Boston's Test Development Process and how it uses Automation (11/11/2015)
• New Editor's Draft of W3C WebDriver Spec (12/16/2015)
• Sauce Labs Webinar: Test Automation Trends for 2016 (1/13/2016)

Coding

• Book Review: Learning Python the Hard Way (2/9/2015)
• Learning Java (3/10/2015)
• Lecture: Customizing Jenkins @ SiteSpect (3/12/2015)
• GitFest @ McGraw Hill Education Labs (4/23/2015)
• Learning the Command Line Interface (5/8/2015) 
• Early History of Object Oriented Programming, and Design Patterns (5/28/2015)
• Meetup: How to Study Design Patterns (6/2/2015)
• John Purcell's Java Courses (6/12/2015) 
• Writing a Login Test vs Dave Haeffner's The-Internet (June 12, 2015)
• Head First Java: Midi and Swing (My version of their Beatbox app) (8/6/2015)
• Automate-Amazon: Writing an Automated Test Framework (12/17/2015)

Security Testing

• Security Testing with Kali Linux: Installation (4/22/2015)
• Beginners Kali Linux: Setup with RailsGoat (4/23/2015)
• Introduction to OWASP: A Security Testing resource (4/30/2015)
• OWASP Boston Meetup: Crowdsource Your Bugs (5/7/2015)

Fitbit-Boston

I joined Fitbit-Boston on March 2015 as a Sr. QA Engineer, and was ramped up to be an automation engineer within the first two months:

• My New Position: Sr. QA Engineer @ Fitbit - Boston (4/4/2015)
• #AmIADeveloperYet? (6/3/2015)
• Fitbit-Boston will be at BostonTechJam (6/10/2015)
• Live Blog: Fitbit-Boston @ BostonTechJam (6/11/2015)
• Live Blog: Free Ice Cream from Fitbit-Boston @ Kendall Square (6/16/2015)
• New York Stock Exchange gets FIT (6/18/2015)
• test.AllTheThings! (6/24/2015)
• Fitbit-Boston hands out free B.Good Smoothies @ Kendall Square (10/8/2015)
• Fitbit-Boston is looking for Java developers who know Python, Hibernate, Spring, AspectJ, MySQL, Cassandra, ActiveMQ, Kafka (10/13/2015)
• Fitbit-Boston's Test Development Process and how it uses Automation (11/11/2015)

Programming Projects

To sharpen my development skill set, I have been working on a few side projects based on what I have learned at Fitbit:

Automate Amazon 
Dec 2015 - Jan 2016

How to develop a rudimentary automation test framework. I used Amazon.com as an example:

• Introduction
• Setup a Development Environment 
• Sketch Out a Use Case 
• Common Utility Methods
• Writing a Sign In Test
• Product Enums, Product Objects, and Pojos
• Initialize Cart and Login
• Writing the Shopping Cart Test
• Data Driven Tests with TestNG

Testing The-Internet
June - July 2015

Writing automated tests versus Dave Haeffner's Login page on his test site, The-Internet.

• Step One: Sketch out the simple manipulation of a Login page
• Step Two: Draft Common Utilities
• Step Three: Storing Constants: static finals vs enums
• Step Four: Storing Locators for Web Elements
• Step Five: The Page Object Model
• Step Six: Writing the Automated Test

More information can be found in the Table of Contents.

I hope you have enjoyed reading the blog as much as I have enjoyed writing it! 

-T.J. Maher
 Sr. QA Engineer, Fitbit
 Boston, MA

// Automated tester for [ 10 ] month and counting!

Please note: 'Adventures in Automation' is a personal blog about automated testing. It is not an official blog of Fitbit.com.