RECORDING UPLOADING – RDB – 08/13/20

Recorded 08/12/20

Organizational impacts from DSL (Domain Specific Language) test automation.

What if I told you that technology could make your life better, and make you happier. During this talk, I’ll share experiences across different companies of different sizes across various industries. Go over the effects of introducing Gherkin based testing (not BDD), what changed, and what problems client’s overcame.
But the most rewarding is how it changed the work for the individuals creating the tests. We’ll use the following model of happiness to show how these tools can improve your life.

Positive Emotion: what we feel (joy, pleasure, comfort, warmth, etc.).
Engagement: being fully absorbed in stimulating activities, being in “flow”.
Relationships: with others that are positive, nurturing, and rewarding.
Meaning: serving some purpose that is larger than oneself.
Accomplishment: the pursuit of achievement and mastery.

We’ll dig into what did not work and why, as well as best practices I’ve learned from the process. Some problems took months to appear, while others showed up during implementation.

My goal for this talk is that you can avoid my mistakes by learning the problems as well as the solutions by joining me on a journey of successes and pitfalls.

Webinar Takeaways:

• You can use technologies even when you can’t conform to the methodology.
• You can build effective testing on legacy systems.
• You can change the relationship of QA to the organization to become a value-generating center.

Additional Questions:

Bas was kind enough to answer the remaining questions that we were unable to get to during the webinar, please enjoy!

Our Speaker:

Bas Hamer – Founder, Possum Labs
Bas Hamer started out wanting to be a developer. He landed his first job, and figured that if he could be a better developer, he could solve all the problems. He ended up being a pretty good developer but the problems were still there. Next he delved into process and architecture; a few jobs later, but the problems he wanted to solve were still there.

Software development is about building the right thing correctly and efficiently. This is a tall order, and software development often fails and usually falls short. No matter what he did the problem remained. Bas then suffered from burn-out and considered going into teaching. Luckily, he ended up helping a QA team. He wanted to turn them into developers, and instead built them a tool, a domain-specific language, that suited their needs better. The QA team roughly tripled their speed and started leading development. The tool Bas created removed sources of conflict by offering human-readable tests, and large API refactors had a minimal impact on QA, and this was the beginning of Possum Labs.

Speaker Details:

Twitter: @bashammer
LinkedIn: Bas Hamer