My answers to questions I received at TAU Conference 2023

Recently it was a pleasure to give a talk about the role of automation in Mobile Continuous Testing at the TAU Conference powered by Applitools, and actually, it was an excellent opportunity to meet different test automation experts and attendees from all over the world.

If you missed the session, you could find the on-demand recording here: applitools.info/kte

During the session, I got various questions about mobile testing and CI, so I wrote this blog to answer them all.

Let’s get started!

Question 1: Automating tests for different devices

Question: What is the most efficient approach when automating tests for the same mobile app on different (Android/iOS) devices? Automate with a tool that works for both or a tool for each one individually?

My answer: The best answer always depends on the team’s needs and goals. Using a tool that works for both platforms is a good choice, because this approach saves time and effort in test automation as it allows you to write test scripts once and run them on multiple devices and platforms such as using Appium. 

But sometimes, the team decides to use platform-specific testing tools such as Espresso for Android and XCUITest for iOS, because they need the mobile developers to work closely with the test engineers in writing the UI tests because they believe it’s a shared responsibility. 

Additionally, they can use the same programming language. Test scripts will be in the same repositories, and using the native locators from the app will be directly accessible in this case.

Question 2: Testing multi-platform apps

Question: Is the approach to/process for testing a multi-platform app like Evernote (mobile, desktop, web) different from a mobile-only app?

My answer: Testing a multi-platform app like Evernote requires a different approach because the following reasons:

• Each platform’s user interface, operating system, hardware, and software requirements (mobile, desktop, web) differ, so testing must account for these differences and ensure that the app operates as intended.
• To ensure consistency across all platforms, including features like note-taking, search, sync, and collaboration, each platform must be tested separately, as well as its integration.
• Testing the app across various platforms ensures the design, navigation, and features are consistent and intuitive.

In order to know how to deal with different platforms, these things should be included in the test plan and strategy at the beginning.

Question 3: Upcoming course content

Question: Is the outline described in your presentation today part of an existing course? Or will it be part of a future course re-haul of your existing course on TAU?
My answer: No, it’s not in my existing courses, but maybe we can have it in the future.

Question 4: Manual testing for mobile CI

Question: When in this mobile CI workflow would manual testing fit in? Or is it suggested that manual testing is not needed?

My answer: If your team would like to achieve the fully automated CI/CD to build, test, package, and release the mobile apps to the App Stores, manual testing will not fit in the lifecycle because the goal is to make the process fully automated as much as we can. But if the target is to have continuous integration only, you can build and package the apps and then send them to the manual testers to do the testing activities. After that, if there are no issues in the build or the release, you can continue with the release process of manually automating it. 

It always depends on the team goal and the release cadence. Some teams or companies release every one or two weeks; in this case, manual testing will be a blocker and releases can take a long time.

Question 5: Manual testing with an automation setup

Question: Is there still a need for manual testing, even with an automation setup?

My answer: Yes, manual testing can be used to identify issues not covered by automated tests, sometimes, different scenarios require a human eye, interaction, or decision. 

It always depends on the type of mobile app and the functionalities we need to cover; this can be added to the test plan and the test strategy from the beginning.

Question 6: Making apps testable

Question: Isn’t it also necessary that apps are made testable?

My answer: Yes, I totally agree, as a mobile development team, we should consider making the mobile app testable by doing the following tips:

• By writing modular code, you can test individual components independently.
• Make your app’s logic, data, and presentation layers separate using design patterns like MVVM or MVP. This will make testing easier.
• Decouple dependencies between classes through dependency injection. This will make it easier to swap out components during testing.

Question 7: Using tools for mobile test automation

Question: If you’re not strong in mobile app automation, for something like a React Native app, would you stick with something like Appium (which is familiar with native automation/Selenium web), or would it be better to try the Maestro (or something similar)?

My answer: The POC (Proof of Concept) project is always the best, in my opinion. If you already have a React Native app, you can try to create a project and try to automate the app with Appium, as you know, Appium is a black-box testing tool so at the end you need only the .apk or .ipa files to be able to automate them, which is not different with React Native apps because at the end you will have already two native apps (iOS and Android). Or you can try Maestro. It’s a new framework, and it may be beneficial in your case.

Question 8: Staying up-to-date on industry skills

Question: Does the coming of flutter make the tester’s life easy?

My answer: I cannot guarantee that, as a tester, we face new challenges every day. For instance, we must learn about new testing tools and technologies, which requires us to stay on top of our game. In contrast, as we can see these days, AI is booming and is affecting our daily work, which makes acquiring unique skills indispensable.

Question 9: Preparing for ISTQB Foundation Certification

Question: How best to prepare for an ISTQB Foundation Certification?

My answer: It depends on which ISTQB certificate you want to achieve, for instance, if it’s the foundation level, you need at least 6 months of experience with software testing to understand the fundamentals and the concepts in the Syllabus. 

As you can see in the following image, the certificates have different tracks and levels. Each level required specific requirements and a different level of experience. You can find all the details on the ISTQB official website, including the Syllabus and the sample questions with answers.

Besides reading the Syllabus, your background will be enough.

Wrapping up

I hope you enjoyed these answers to your questions, and I look forward to seeing you at the TAU and Applitools conferences in the near future.

Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any other questions.

My LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/moataz-nabil/

My Twitter: @moatazeldebsy

Thank you for reading.

Happy testing!

When you see technical assessment as one of the stages of an interview, what do you do? Does the panic set in? In order to gain confidence in technical tasks, the best way is to practice and tackle them head on.

In this blog, I will walk through:

• My experience as a candidate, having previously had job titles including QA Engineer, SDET, and QA Automation Lead.
• Encountering different types of technical tasks, from the classic whiteboard FizzBuzz programming task to a take-home task building a test framework from scratch.
• Advice as a hiring manager from my experience as QA Lead at a healthcare startup in the UK, where I will touch on not only the technical aspects of the interview but also the behavioral and situational based questions we ask candidates, providing tips on how to prepare as well.

All tips and advice are based on my experience as a hiring manager, hiring for a QA Engineer.

My experience as a candidate

I’ve never been the most technical person. I graduated university with a psychology degree and managed to land a graduate scheme job which taught me the skills on the job, alongside working as a Test Analyst. Therefore, whenever I see a technical part of the job interview process, my anxiety definitely sets in. However, having been through quite a few of these during my career I’ve come up with a few different tactics.

My approach is to refresh my skills either in the programming language or automation test framework and practice! This may mean accepting multiple job interviews in order to use some companies’ technical assignments just as a form of rehearsal. If that’s not possible, Test Automation University (TAU) provides code samples and assignments to refresh your skills.

Of course, every job has its own spin on the technical task but generally follows a similar pattern. Interviews for QA Engineer and Test Automation roles often focus on end-to-end testing with frameworks based on Selenium, Puppeteer, Cypress, or Playwright. While doing these tasks, I always spent too long on them and would focus on using the latest language features or making sure to abstract any duplicate code to helper functions.

Some of the tasks I encountered as a candidate, I definitely thought I had failed as I completed them, especially when they were whiteboard technical tasks. The first one was FizzBuzz and another was sorting and filtering a list. It’s very difficult for me to perform these tasks on a whiteboard using pseudocode without having a keyboard in front of me and without Stack Overflow. Often the person interviewing uses these types of tasks to understand your thought process and how you communicate throughout the activity.

Advice from my candidate experience

These tasks often don’t relate to the daily activities an automation tester or SDET will be performing. In my opinion, the interviewer shouldn’t be assessing the completion of the task or the actual solution. From my experience, my advice for these type of programming tasks: 

• Don’t overthink it: Get a solution down and rewrite it later.
• Ask questions: It can buy some time for thinking.
• Become comfortable with silence: The interviewer won’t be comfortable with the silence either.

The technical assessment

As a hiring manager, I have seen some bad and some bizarre submissions as part of the technical test. Some red flags, I have witnessed while reviewing our technical tasks:

• One of the tasks was missing from the submission
• No assertions in automated checks
• Assertion within test wrapped in try / catch
• “Negative” scenario provided is actually a positive scenario

Getting the basics right is so important. TAU has many courses to help refresh and upskill in preparation for technical jobs.

How I evaluate technical assessments

I will walk through the process of how I evaluate a technical task, which will help how to approach the task effectively:

• Firstly, once I have received the technical task back from the candidate, I open up the README.md file and try to run the project. If the instructions are clear and easy to understand, this gives a great first impression. Making the hiring manager’s job easier by describing how to run the tests is a really good start.
• Secondly, by running the tests (hopefully, they are green), I read the names given to the tests. This defines what is actually being tested, demonstrating understanding of the task itself.
• Thirdly, looking at the new code, have the assertions answered the right question? Especially around the negative scenario, does it handle unwelcome behavior? Too often, negative testing is misunderstood.
• Fourthly, when the test is focused on UI test automation, what element locators have been used? Following the hierarchy of best practices in Cypress documentation is a good reference. Obviously, the best locators are not always available to the candidate, but commenting what should be used will not go unnoticed. This is where comments in the code are allowed and should definitely be used to assist with helping the hiring manager understand your thoughts.
• Fifthly, has the code been structured to facilitate maintenance and stability? For example, moving setup steps to beforeEach proves you know how to make tests independent. Also, refactoring code to be easier to read and understand helps in proving your experience of working with unfriendly code.

These are some key areas which I focus on during the review process, but overall, I’m looking for simplicity, clarity, and following best practices. I always request candidates don’t take too long on a task. Comments with future improvements are enough in this scenario.

The behavioral assessment

Often the interview will be split into multiple sections, one of those could be behavioral or situational style questions. For example, “How do you deal with a situation when a developer says a bug is actually a feature?” The role as an automation tester involves working as part of a team, therefore it’s important to prepare for these questions. As before with the coding exercises, practice can help prepare for this style of interview questions. By rehearsing examples from your experience, the answers are often articulated more fluently.

How I evaluate behavioral assessments

If we take the example of dealing with challenging developers, questioning bugs. Some things I look for:

• Firstly, how closely a tester works with developers and what kind of relationship they have. Working at a startup, it is very important that the QA Engineers and developers work together to solve problems.
• Secondly, persuading and influencing peers. Whether they involve other stakeholders and how much information is gathered before presenting the argument. Again, within a startup environment, we are looking for people who solve their own problems. Involving managers and other stakeholders is still appropriate in certain circumstances, but trying to resolve on your own first shows proactivity and independence.
• Thirdly, attention to detail when it comes to acceptance criteria and what stage this conversation happens within the software development lifecycle (SLDC). Particularly what I am looking for is someone who promotes “3 Amigos” (ideally all 3 but 2 is good enough). These 3 Amigos conversations help eradicate requirements being misunderstood before development starts.

These behavioral or situational questions relate to daily activities for a tester, how someone works within a team, and especially their communication skills. Obviously as a hiring manager, I want to hear about real experiences candidates have had. However, including your opinion on how the team or process could be improved is also valued. Describing the kind of environment the candidate would like to work in helps differentiate between previous and desired experience.

Tips from a hiring manager

Having interviewed many candidates and reviewed lots of technical assessments, these are a few of my tips to think about when interviewing:

1. Don’t be afraid to ask questions. A core attribute of a good tester is asking good questions. Therefore this is encouraged within my interviews, the more questions or clarifications the better.
2. Show your workings. Just like when you are doing a math exam at school. It’s important how you got to the answer, whether that is as comments within code or verbally when explaining your solution.
3. Admit what you don’t know. It’s better to state what you are unsure about, whereas trying to guess, the interviewer can only interpret what you say. An honest person is very well received from my perspective. As I can teach a skill to a prospective candidate, the other attributes are more difficult to coach.

To conclude

As a hiring manager, I am not looking for the finished article. Everyone has had different experiences and opportunities. This should always be taken into consideration. What’s important to demonstrate within the interview process is how you communicate, work as part of a team, and your technical skills. In order to do that, explain your thought process, provide your opinion, and be clear what you still need to learn.

ICYMI: Get connected, be inspired, and sharpen your skills with on-demand expert session recordings from Test Automation University Conference 2023.

Test Automation University (TAU) is the premier platform for learning about software testing and automation. Powered by Applitools, TAU offers dozens of courses on all testing topics imaginable from the world’s best instructors for FREE.

In my previous article, I shared a breakdown of TAU by the numbers. I covered all the stats and metrics about TAU today. Now, in this article, I’d like to share the future by publicly announcing all the new content we have scheduled in our development pipeline!

New courses

Test Automation Design Patterns by Sarah Watkins

Up first is Test Automation Design Patterns by my good friend Sarah Watkins. Anyone who’s ever worked on a test project knows that good test cases don’t just happen – they’re built intentionally. In this upcoming course, Sarah teaches everything she knows about designing and delivering test automation projects at scale, from formulating tests to follow Arrange-Act-Assert, to using dependency injection for handling test inputs and other objects, to deciding between page objects or the Screenplay Pattern. This will be an advanced course to really help you become the ultimate SDET, or “Software Development Engineer in Test.”

GitHub Actions for Testing by Matthias Zax

Next up is GitHub Actions for Testing by Matthias Zax. Automation means much more than merely scripting test case procedures. It includes automating repetitive segments of your development process, like running tests and reporting results. GitHub Actions are a marvelous, lightweight way to add helpful workflows to manage your source code repositories. In this course, Matthias teaches how to create GitHub Actions specifically for testing and quality concerns. I know GitHub Actions have transformed how I run my own GitHub projects, and I’m sure they’ll make a big difference for you, too!

Behavior-Driven Development with SpecFlow by Bas Dijkstra

Next is a course for a topic very near and dear to my own heart: Behavior-Driven Development with SpecFlow by Bas Dijkstra. Behavior-Driven Development, or “BDD” for short, is a set of pragmatic practices that help you develop high-quality, valuable behaviors. Not only will Bas walk through the phases of Discovery, Formulation, and Automation, but he will show you how to use SpecFlow – one of the best BDD test frameworks around – to automate Gherkin scenarios. He will also teach how to integrate SpecFlow with popular libraries like Selenium WebDriver and RestAssured.NET.

I hope you’re excited for those three upcoming courses. Course development takes time, so we don’t have a hard publishing date set, but be on the lookout for them this year. I know Sarah, Matthias, and Bas are all hard at work recording their chapters.

New learning paths

That’s not all our new content. We have a lot more to announce today, so let’s keep going.

Visual Testing Learning Path

We have a new learning path to announce: Visual Testing! Applitools’ very own Matt Jasaitis is developing a three-part series on visual testing. The example code uses Selenium WebDriver with Java, but the concepts he teaches are universal. The first two courses in this learning path are already available. The third course, with the tentative title Expert Visual Testing Practices, will be available by April.

Leadership Learning Path

Historically, Test Automation University has focused almost exclusively on testing and automation skills. As we grow in our career as professionals, we often find we need to develop other kinds of skills as well. That’s why I’m excited to announce that TAU will be developing a new learning path for leadership!

Managing Test Teams by Jenny Bramble

The first course in our new leadership track will be Managing Test Teams by Jenny Bramble. At some point in our careers, many of us face the question, “Should I become a manager?” Becoming a good manager requires a different skill set than becoming a good tester or a good engineer. It comes with a new set of challenges that you might not expect. In this course, Jenny will share everything she’s learned about leading teams of testers, holding crucial conversations, and deciding if a career path in management is right for you. Jenny is also one of our speakers later today, so be sure to join her session.

Building Up Quality Leaders by Laveena Ramchandani

The second course will be Building Up Quality Leaders by Laveena Ramchandani. While Jenny’s course will focus primarily on being a good manager, Laveena’s course will focus on attributes of leadership that apply to any role within software quality. Laveena will cover leadership skills like servanthood, charisma, decisiveness, and gratitude, and how they all apply to the testing world.

Creating Effective Test Strategies by Erin Crise

The third course will be Creating Effective Test Strategies by Erin Crise. The key to leading successful testing initiatives is a solid, well-grounded, well-balanced strategy. The strategy must balance automation with exploration. It must include a variety of areas such as visuals, accessibility, and performance. It must be communicated effectively across teams. And it must be agile enough to adjust to changes. With her wealth of experience from several software projects, Erin will teach how to plan and execute effective test strategies in this course.

Just like for the other upcoming courses I just announced, these leadership courses aren’t ready yet. Expect them to drop later this year. We are also planning a few more courses in this leadership path, so stay tuned for more details!

Refreshing old courses

Now, we said earlier how TAU is over four years old. In the world of tech, that’s a long time. I hate to say it, but some of our courses are becoming outdated. Tools and frameworks evolve – as they should. It’s time to refresh many of our courses.

Last year, we published our first refresh courses: Introduction to Robot Framework by Paul Merrill and UI Automation with WebdriverIO v7 by Julia Pottinger. Both refresh courses were well received by our community of students.

After auditing our whole course catalog, I decided that it’s time to refresh some more courses!

Cypress courses by Filip Hric

Our intro and advanced Cypress courses are among our most popular. In fact, Introduction to Cypress is currently ranked #8 for monthly completions. This is no surprise given Cypress’s incredible popularity with front end developers. However, our mainstay courses were published before many of Cypress’s current features, like component testing and the new directory structure introduced with Cypress 10.

Filip Hric will take up the challenge to refresh both the intro and advanced Cypress courses. He will redevelop them to flow together cohesively as parts 1 and 2. We will also create a new Cypress learning path for them once we publish them.

Playwright courses by Renata Andrade

As a Playwright Ambassador, I can’t let Cypress have all the fun. Playwright is so hot right now. The community is booming, the downloads are skyrocketing, and even within Applitools and TAU, we see its adoption growing significantly. That’s why we are not only refreshing our introduction-to-Playwright course, but we are also going to publish an all-new Advanced Playwright course!

Our instructor Renata Andrade, like Filip, will develop these courses to be parts 1 and 2. She will also develop them in TypeScript. And you’d better believe we’ll create a Playwright learning path for them as well.

Mobile Automation with Appium in Java by Moataz Nabil

Let’s not forget mobile test automation as well. Moataz Nabil is going to split his course, Mobile Automation with Appium in Java, into two parts. At six and a half hours, this course is currently the longest on TAU. By splitting it into two parts, we hope to make it easier for students to complete.

Web Element Locator Strategies by Andrew Knight

And finally, there’s one more course we plan to redevelop: my very first course, Web Element Locator Strategies. In my refresh, I intend to develop new subchapters to show how to write locators in different frameworks like Playwright and Cypress, not just in Selenium Java. I’ll include new types of locators as well.

Retired courses

We also needed to retire a few of our courses that are out of date:

1. Automated Visual Testing with Java by Angie Jones
2. AI for Element Selection by Jason Arbon
3. From Scripting to Framework with Selenium and C# by Carlos Kidman

In case you missed it, we removed these courses from TAU at the beginning of March. I want to thank these instructors for making these courses.

A full curriculum

I know I’ve talked a lot about learning paths today. One of the most requested new features we receive is certificates for completing learning paths. I’m sorry to say that we are not going to add certificates for learning paths. Learning paths are somewhat dynamic. They can change over time as we publish new courses. So, giving certificates for completing them doesn’t make sense.

Instead, we are toying with a stronger idea: a curriculum. A learning path concentrates on one narrow testing topic, like leadership or visual testing. I want to create a comprehensive program of courses covering a wide breadth of testing topics, and to recognize completion of that program with something like a diploma. We have a rich catalog of courses for building a strong curriculum. Right now, this is still in the idea stage. I’m hoping to bring it into reality later this year.

One more thing…

TAU is four years old, and while I hate to admit it, the TAU platform itself is starting to show its age. With so many courses available, it’s becoming hard to find the ones you want. On the backend, it actually takes quite a bit of manual labor to publish a new course, too.

It’s time to refresh the TAU platform. It’s time for TAU version 2.

Over the coming months, Matt Jasaitis and I will redevelop the whole TAU web app. Yes, that’s the same Matt Jasaitis who is creating the Visual Testing learning path. Our goal is to build a sustainable learning platform to serve Test Automation University for years to come. We will also build a better support system into the platform. Unfortunately, this project is so new that I don’t even have mockups to show you yet, but at least I can announce that TAUv2 is coming.

So, what do y’all think about all this new content coming to TAU? We’d love to hear from you. Let us know through TAU Slack.

Test Automation University (TAU) is the premier platform for learning about software testing and automation. Powered by Applitools, TAU offers dozens of courses on all testing topics imaginable from the world’s best instructors for FREE.

In this article, I’d like to share a breakdown of Test Automation University by the numbers: all the stats and metrics that we gather for insights into the program. I also shared this information in my keynote address for Test Automation University’s 2023 conference, What’s New With TAU? Let’s dive in!

Students, courses, and achievements

Believe it or not, it’s been four years since Applitools launched TAU! Four years is a long time. That’s as long as a typical college undergraduate degree.

I remember feeling thrilled when Applitools first launched TAU. Before then, there wasn’t any cohesive, community-oriented education platform for testing and automation. Most schools barely included testing topics in their programs. While the Web had a wealth of information, it was difficult to know which resources were both comprehensive and trustworthy. Test Automation University provided a central platform that could be trusted with literally the best and the brightest instructors in the world.

Now, I can’t imagine a world without TAU. At least once a week, someone I’ve never met before slides into my DMs and asks me, “Andy, how can I start learning about testing and automation?” I literally just tell them, “Have you heard of Test Automation University?” Boom. Done. I don’t have to check my bookshelf for titles or do a quick search for blog articles. I just say go to TAU. They’re always grateful.

And when they do go to TAU, they join our ever-growing community of students! Just last month, we crossed 150 thousand registered “TAU-dents”! That’s a huge size for any community.

Every time we’ve hit a milestone, we’ve celebrated. When we hit 50 thousand students in June 2020, we threw our first TAU Party. Then, when we hit 100 thousand students, we hosted TAU: The Homecoming, our first virtual conference. That’s when I first joined Applitools. Now, at 150 thousand students, we’re hosting our second virtual conference.

Our growth is also accelerating. Historically, we have grown by 50 thousand students about every year and a half. This most recent milestone happened a little sooner than expected.

Every week, about 800 to 1000 new students sign up for TAU. That’s sustained, consistent growth. It’s awesome to see all the new students joining every week.

Over 4 years, we have published a total of 73 courses. That’s a lot of content! A single course has at least 4 chapters with at least 30 minutes of video lessons. Most courses average about 8 chapters over an hour of content, and our longest courses stretch to 6 hours! We try to publish a new course about once a month. And the best part is that every one of our courses is completely, totally, absolutely FREE!

Our courses would be nothing without the excellent instructors who teach them. To date, we have 48 different instructors who have produced courses for TAU. These folks are the real superstars. They are bona fide software testing champions. Let me tell you, it is no small effort to develop a TAU course.

When Applitools first launched TAU back in 2019, I remember thinking to myself as a younger panda, “Man, that’s awesome. I wish I could be part of that. Maybe someday I can develop a TAU course and be like them.” A few months later, Angie Jones slid into my DMs and asked me if I’d want to develop my first course: Web Element Locator Strategies. In all honesty, TAU is one of the main reasons I work at Applitools today!

Let’s look at achievements next. In total, all students have completed 162 thousand courses! That’s 162 thousand certificates and 162 thousand badges, averaging slightly more than 1 course completion per student.

The credit total is even more impressive. Our students have earned about 116 million course credits. That’s just under 800 credits per student, which correlates to about one course’s worth of credits. 116 million credits earned is a mind-blowing number, and that total is only going to increase with time.

Course completion analysis

Those are just some raw numbers on TAU. I also did some deeper analysis on our courses to learn what topics and formats are most valuable to our community. Let’s take a look at that together.

When evaluating courses, the main metric I measure is course completion – meaning, how many students completed the course and earned a certificate. Anyone can start a course, but it takes dedication to complete the course. Completion signals the highest level of engagement with TAU: a student must dedicate hours of study and coding to earn a course badge.

My goal for any course we publish – and how I determine if a course is “successful” in most basic terms – is to consistently hit 30 completions per month, or 1 completion per day. Very popular courses hit 2 completions per day, and our most popular courses hit at least 3 completions per day.

Our top 10 courses are all in that upper echelon of completion rate. Our most popular course by far is Angie Jones’ Setting a Foundation for Successful Test Automation, followed by my course, Web Element Locator Strategies.

All three of our programming courses – Java, JavaScript, and Python – appear in the top 10. Rounding out the top 10 are courses on Selenium WebDriver, Cypress, API testing, and IntelliJ IDEA. If you want to see more details about the most popular TAU courses, check out the article I wrote about it a few months ago on the Applitools blog. Note that some small shifts have happened since I wrote that article, but the information is still mostly accurate.

When partitioning the full catalog of courses by the programming languages they use, we can see that Java and JavaScript dominate the landscape. This should be no surprise, since those two languages are by far the most popular languages for test automation. Applitools product data also backs this up. TAU offers a good number of Python and C# courses that are reasonably popular. I personally developed 3 of those 7 Python courses. TAU also offers a handful of courses that use Ruby and other languages. Unfortunately, however, we have discovered that those courses, especially for Ruby, have very low completion rates. Again, I surmise that this reflects broader industry trends.

I also analyzed the completion rate for a course versus its length. What I found is probably not surprising: shorter courses have higher completion rates, while longer courses have lower completion rates. The average completion rate for all courses is 57%. The breaking point appears to be at about two hours, with a sweet spot between 60-90 minutes. Since we want to encourage course completions, we are going to encourage instructors to produce courses in the hour-to-hour-and-a-half range moving forward.

So, what’s next?

These numbers describe TAU as it is today. In my next article, I’ll share all the new plans we have for TAU, including upcoming courses!

Have you registered for the free virtual Test Automation University (TAU) Conference 2023 yet? This two-day event is an amazing opportunity to improve your software testing skills. There will be speaking events and hands-on workshops from industry leaders and test automation experts. We also have networking sessions to connect with the speakers and your software peers.

While this event is free, it will take time out of your day to attend and participate in the activities. Getting buy-in from your manager for you to take this time is crucial to ensure you can get the most out of the event. We’ve written this guide to make getting this buy-in a breeze.

Hone your automation skills

The workshops and conference sessions are curated with career development in mind to help you learn new skills and stay up to date with trending technologies.

Attend hands-on workshops

The first day of the conference is full of hands-on workshops led by thought leaders and experts. These workshops are filling up quickly! If your first choice is full, you can select something else. You’ll have access to all recordings on-demand after the event.

• Head-to-Head Web Testing Part 1 with Cypress: Filip Hric from Cypress will guide you through the first steps to start using Cypress and set up a project on your own.
• Introduction to Performance and Load Testing with k6: Leandro Melendez from k6 will share the importance of performance testing and how to use k6 for performance testing.
• Getting Started with Visual Testing: Anand Bagmar from Applitools will explore the importance of automated visual validation and how to integrate Applitools Visual AI into your Selenium-Java automation.
• Head-to-Head Web Testing Part 2 with Playwright: Andrew Knight from Applitools will guide you through setting up a Playwright project with the same tests as Filip’s workshop.
• Going Beyond Unit Testing from the Inside: Tariq King will recap his TAU course Testing from the Inside and go deeper into the world of unit testing and other related code-based testing approaches.
• An Introduction to API Automation with Javascript: Julia Pottinger will cover automating common API requests, negative tests for your API, error handling with your APIs, and automating API workflows.

Listen to live sessions

On the second day of the event, we have speakers giving talks that can help you find your fire to pursue your career goals with confidence. Each session has a live Q&A with the speaker at the end. This gives you a chance to get clarification or even expand further into a topic that’s more specific to your team’s challenges.

• From Washing Cars To Automating Test Applications: Rex Jones II from FieldRoutes will share his career story of getting into software testing and the challenges he faced on the way.
• A Holistic Approach to Testing in Continuous Delivery: Lisa Crispin from Lisa Crispin Consulting LLC will explore the useful experiments her team used to overcome common challenges in continuous delivery.
• Bigger than the Box: Erika Chestnut will provide the closing keynote of the conference. She will share her experience breaking out of the box to expand the role of quality in her organizations.

Attend shorter lightning talks

A few of our speakers prepared lightning talks to teach concepts in a short amount of time. Some of these talks include:

• What the QA Position Will Look Like in the Future: Rafaela Azevedo from Crytpacademy will explore how testing roles are evolving.
• Supercharging Your CI Workflow with Java and GitHub Actions: Nikolay Advolodkin from Sauce Labs will share how to use Java and GitHub Actions for continuous integration.
• The Role of Automation in Mobile Continuous Testing: Moataz Nabil from Bitrise will discuss using automation in continuous testing of mobile apps.

Network with other experts

This event is so much more than a series of webinars. Both days of the virtual conference also include networking breaks to connect with the speakers and other attendees.

The first networking break of the event will have following speakers:

• Filip Hric from Cypress
• Tariq King from EPAM
• Anand Bagmar from Applitools
• Julia Pottinger from QualityWorks Consulting Group
• Leandro Melendez from k6
• Rafaela Azevedo from Cryptacademy

The second networking break will have the following speakers:

• Moataz Nabil from Bitrise
• Rex Jones II from FieldRoutes
• Carlos Kidman from Stealth Startup
• Nikolay Advolodkin from Sauce Labs
• Rafaela Azevedo from Cryptacademy

The third and final networking break will have the following speakers:

• Erika Chestnut
• Leandro Melendez from k6
• Lisa Crispin from Lisa Crispin Consulting LLC
• Carlos Kidman from Stealth Startup
• Tara Walton
• Dan Gorelick

Get inspired about test automation

Even though this event is virtual, we don’t want it to feel like you’re just watching. We have activities, quizzes, and prizes to get you excited about learning more and growing your skill sets.

If you join the event a few minutes early at 8:45am PT on March 9th, you can watch the pep rally, hosted by Joe Colantonio from TestGuild. Throughout the day, you can participate in testing games and quizzes. You can hear even live algorave performance by Dan Gorelick at the halfway show.

Join us for the event

We hope this guide helps you align with your manager on attending TAU Conference 2023. To make it easier to share with your manager, we’ve provided an email template. Be sure to edit to fill in your responses, add your own voice, and include other reasons you want to attend.

Register for your virtual spot to join us March 8–9. If you can’t attend the full event, don’t worry. All registrants have access to the on-demand archive of recordings after the event.

See you there!

WebdriverIO is an amazing test automation framework, and I am very excited that on December 1, 2022 WebdriverIO officially announced its version 8 release! With its previous updates in versions 6 and 7, the WebdriverIO team rewrote everything in TypeScript, removed sync support to transition to async-only, and added integration for Google Lighthouse. This version 8 release is a welcomed refinement of the framework. It shouldn’t change much for end users, nor should it have breaking changes.

With its update to version 8, WebdriverIO: 

• updated the helpful one-line command to set up a new project
• removes support for older versions of Node.js
• transitions from CommonJS to ESM
• implements a new Action API interface
• adds a new runner for Unit and Component Testing in the browser
• streamlines the way WebdriverIO deals with global objects using the test runner

Of course, the team also updated the documentation, too.

Let’s explore the WebdriverIO v8 updates.

Update to One-line Setup Command

A small but effective update so far that made me smile was being able to set up a WebdriverIO project with one command `$ npm init wdio@latest ./`. After that command, it asks you all the questions needed to set up and run your tests. It provides you with predefined options for not only end-to-end testing of web and mobile applications but unit and component testing as well.

Support for Node.js v12, v13, and v14 dropped

The Node.js team moved Node.js v14 into a maintenance Long Term Support (LTS) phase in October 2021. It is now in “maintenance” until its end-of-life in April 2023. With newer versions of Node.js available, the WebdriverIO team recommends updating to Node.js v16 or v18 directly.

Find out more about Node.js release schedule.

Transition from Common JS to EMCAScript modules (ESM)

To give some background, CommonJS and ESM refer to the module system that allows us to use code from a “next” developer/library or code/data that is in a different file. The CommonJS module system has been the default module system within the Node.js ecosystem. However, the ES module was added in Node.js v8.5.0 and has been stabilized and incorporated as standard from Node.js v13.2.0. 
You may be familiar with using `require` to use your page objects in your test files and `module.exports` or `exports` so that your page objects or other files can be accessed by your tests. This method of managing files and libraries is the CommonJS way.

With ESM you use `import` and `export` to manage files and libraries.

There are some other differences between them, but for you, the end user, this is the main one. 
This change should not affect your work as CommonJS is still supported. However, if you want to use ES modules then you can now do so. I recommend getting familiar with ESM and how it works before starting to use it. Hopefully, in the near future, there will be additional boilerplates from WebdriverIO on using ESM in your projects https://webdriver.io/docs/boilerplates/.

New Runner for Unit and Component Testing in the Browser

An exciting v8 feature is the new browser runner that allows you to run unit and component tests in an actual/real browser environment. This is going to provide you with a more realistic user interaction with your components. It comes with presets for React, Vue, Svelte, SolidJS among others, and is powered by Vite.js.

Find out more details about this new runner.

New Action Interface

This is a new interface that makes executing various actions much easier. Two new browser commands action and actions have been added. It is now much simpler and type-safe to run the right action, e.g. sending key events to the browser.

Read more about this in the WebdriverIO API docs.

WebDriver BiDi Support

WebdriverIO is based on the WebDriver protocol, which is a web standard for automating browsers. This means that, with WebdriverIO, your tests are running in a browser that your user uses rather than a browser engine. 

This WebDriver BiDi Support means that whenever new protocol changes happen in Webdriver, you as the user can use it once it’s available in browsers. 
The idea of WebDriver BiDi is to make a new standard protocol for browser automation, which will be based on the bi-directional transport protocol (WebSocket or pipes).

Optional Globals

The WebdriverIO test runner would usually register the browser object or the $ and $$ commands to the global scope. With v8 update, the user can decide if they want to continue attaching these objects and methods to the global scope or prefer importing them directly.

To import them directly you would say : 

import { browser, $, $$, expect } from ‘@wdio/globals’

Importing the $ command allows you to use it from the @wdio/globals:

Using Visual Studio Code as my code editor, if I hover over the $ it shows that it is coming as a global import from WebdriverIO:

A new configuration property called injectGlobals (defaults: true) handles whether the test runner modifies the global scope or not. If your setup works fine using global objects, no change is needed to update to v8.

You don’t have to import from @wdio/globals as it will still work.

Other Updates

Aside from these major updates, documentation has been improved and new API docs around WebdriverIO objects like browser, element, and mock have been introduced. The behavior of relative spec or exclude paths was also fixed so that now specs and exclude paths will be always seen as relative to the config file and –spec arguments, relative from the working directory.
To see all of the details of this latest release, visit the WebdriverIO blog.

Update to WebdriverIO version 8 from version 7

Install a module to help update outdated npm modules

`npm install -g npm-check-updates`

Run `ncu` to show list of outdated npm packages:

Then run `ncu -u` to upgrade your package.json:

Then finally run npm install to install new versions:

I then reran all my tests and they passed successfully.

My thoughts on the version update

WebdriverIO’s version 8 update is a continuation of work by the WebdriverIO team to make the framework more rounded and robust. I like the changes that have been made and I am looking forward to trying out unit component testing with WebdriverIO.

I love that the updates don’t have breaking changes and so this allowed me to upgrade from version 7 to 8. I would recommend that you update your project to the latest version to benefit from the updates that have been made.
If you are interested in learning more about WebdriverIO, check out my WebdriverIO course on Test Automation University. Also, check out this repo with a sample example using WebdriverIO v8.