QAKL is a group of QA enthusiast, started by Chong Fong Kai (2012) and they meet monthly to share anything related to Quality Assurance or Testing. Last Wed was their first gathering to kickstart 2014 and I was there to check out the crowd and explore how MYOB could contribute to this community.
Event was held at The Hall of Awesomeness, Mindvalley in Menara UOA Bangsar which is not too far from our office in Bangsar South. The meetup is not organized by Mindvalley itself but they offered the event hall (free of charge) for Chong to host his QAKL meetups.
Three presentation sessions were lined up for the evening
- Rina Masrina (IProperty Group) – Automated testing on mobile devices
- Shafiq Eric Liam (Mudah.my) – Basic introduction to Selenium IDE
- Fong Kai (Mudah.my) – Testing in Continuous Integration Part1 – Why and How To Perform Unit Test
Automated Testing on Mobile Devices
By Rina Masrina
She started as an intern at iProperty last year and I was informed she did her first talk/sharing in QAKL last April and this is her 2nd talk in QAKL. Goes to show that you do not need to be a seasoned professional or expert to do a sharing session. All of us have done interesting stuff that others would love to hear of.
She’s in the Mobile team at iProperty and for today’s session, she shared her experience on automating Android UI tests in a CI environment using Robotium and/or Espresso.
Basic Introduction to Selenium IDE Testing
By Shafiq Eric Liam
Next up was Shafiq from Mudah.my. Mudah.my is a local ecommerce marketplace portal. Shafiq has less than 5 yrs of testing experience and does not even come from a computer background. He’s an advertising graduate by training but being involved in product testing for the past few years have turned him into an experienced black-box tester.
Tonight Shafiq shared his experience on using Selenium IDE to do record-n-play automation of test cases in his work at Mudah.my. The tool looks interesting but it’s only workable on Firefox and given Mudah.my needs to be tested across multiple browsers, it seems the Firefox constraint is a big setback.
Selenium IDE is also limited to do record-n-playback with no scripting (programming) capabilities offered. For that, you’ll have to go with Selenium WebDriver (not covered in his talk since as he mentioned earlier, he’s basically a blackbox tester and doesn’t do whitebox testing).
Testing in Continuous Integration Part 1 – Why and How To Perform Unit Test
By Fong Kai
Final sharing was done by Kai, the founder of this group. He shared the importance of having good unit test coverage if your team is looking to get into continuous integration. The example used in this talk was based on JUnit. Kai started his session with a brief walk-thru of what continuous integration (CI) is, and then going into the reason unit test is important in making CI works.
The crowd was mostly QA with only a few developers so you kinda get a muted response when unit test was brought up. An interesting observation was the brief debate whether TDD (test driven development) is helpful and should be enforced among projects – or to put the question another way, what type of projects might not benefit from TDD?
My thoughts
This was my first attendance at a QAKL session and it’s nice to see a good crowd of QA enthusiasts gathered for an evening of sharing & learning on QA automation. I thought three sessions in an evening was packing things a bit tight. Session ended close to 10 pm but no one was complaining. J
BDD was mentioned a few times and the few developers in the group were quite interested in TDD practices. General interest on automation – be it record-n-play or programming scripts – are high. Record-n-play automation probably rules the court for now since most of the automation interest centered around UI tests.
Overall it was a good session (and a great effort from Kai). Am sure those who came learnt a thing or two about QA & automation. Would be interested to see how the MYOB QA group can share & contribute their experiences with this community.
Do join the QAKL Facebook group if you are interested to be updated with their future events. Kai is now structuring the meetups into monthly sessions; with even months for general sharing and odd months for hands-on workshops.
Link to FB Event: https://www.facebook.com/events/526825907436007/?ref=3&ref_newsfeed_story_type=regular
aucheekeong 