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AutomationSTAR

Test Automation Conference Europe

Track Talk T5

Anti-fragile Automation

John Kent

11:15-12:00, Tuesday 21st November

In his book, Anti-fragile, Nassim Taleb, writes: “The antifragile loves randomness and uncertainty, which also means crucially – a love of errors…” Antifragile systems are systems that improve and become stronger when subjected to volatility, shocks and failures.

User Interface Test Automation is well known to be fragile. UI tests often fail in a way that may appear to be random. Is it possible that we could take an Antifragile approach to test automation? Can we learn to love failures so that they help us improve our test automation? We draw on Taleb’s ideas to see why we should study failures and how, with the right approach, they can provide a path to better test automation.

Along the way we will ask the question “Why is UI Automation fragile?” We look at what could go wrong in UI test automation and classify the different types of failure. We will create a taxonomy of UI Automation failure types and make conclusions about test automation and how to build it.

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What you will Learn

  1. A clearer understanding of UI Test Automation failure types
  2. A cure for flakiness
  3. An Antifragile approach to UI Test Automation which will improve your automated tests.

Session Details

  • Intermediate
  • 45 mins
  • Includes 15mins Q&A
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Session Speaker

John Kent

M.Sc. - SimplyTesting, U.K.

John Kent has been helping organisations with test automation for over thirty years. His first testing job was in transplant immunology, testing donor’s blood to see if recipient patents would accept or reject transplanted kidneys or bone marrow. He tried to automate this testing – and failed!

He became a software developer and then a tester and his next automation project, which was on mainframe, was much more successful. Since then he has built test automation frameworks in MS-Test, WinRunner, UFT, Selenium WebDriver, WinAppDriver and others. These have spanned data driven, keyword driven, standard, BDD, hybrid and low-code framework approaches. He has presented at many conferences across Europe and the U.S. and wrote a chapter for the book ‘Experiences of Test Automation’. Late in the last century he was co-author of the Official Netscape Guide to JavaScript1.2.

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