Nordic Testing Days 2023

In this workshop we will establish a shared understanding of what Quality Engineering is, in which way it is different to traditional testing, and what its benefits are. Using a number of hands-on exercises we will learn about shifting left and shifting right, about good and bad quality habits, and how to incentivise one while discouraging the other. We will leverage feedback cycles, exercise our quality muscles and flex our ability to cultivating good quality habits within our sphere of influence. Quality Engineering is a whole team exercise, so we’ll discover how you can start with small steps towards causing larger scale changes in teams – for happier and better performing teams.

Key takeaways
1. You can explain to others what Quality Engineering (QE) is about, and how it is different to traditional approaches
2. Learn how to continuously test in all phases of the DevOps infinity loop of product development
3. Deep-dive into patterns and activities in each of the three QE pillars (shift left, quality as team responsibility, shift right)
4. You will have applied this hands on, working in groups on a case study
5. You will apply it individually to your working context and have the initial steps planned
6. There will be time for feedback on your individual solutions.

Prerequisites for participants:
Participants don't need to bring anything - everything will be provided by the speaker.

Ping! Your phone has an alert - an escalation from support. Website performance has deteriorated, sessions are dropping, and it is late in the evening. So open your laptop and grab a drink. It will be a long night of performance debugging and issue fixing.

I don't want you to have this experience.

Performance testing, in my experience, is a skill many testers don't often get to explore and develop. The result? Reactive support escalations at inconvenient times filled with stress. But we can change that. Join me in this hands-on workshop based on my experience testing performance for clients with load-intensive applications. We will dive deep into performance testing using K6 and JavaScript. You will learn:

* The business case of why performance is so vital to organisations. The cost in user retention and revenue.
* Models such as RAIL and the Golden Signals, these models help you better understand performance requirements.
* Write K6 tests using JavaScript against APIs inspired by issues discovered with my clients.
* Better interpret the results of performance tests to have real actionable insights you can share with your team.

By our working together you will gain confidence in performance testing APIs. A confidence which will help you discover performance issues early. Being proactive addressing them before production incidents occur. More importantly protecting your evening and avoiding that support call.

Key takeaways:
​1. Understand the business and technical fundamentals which underpin performance testing.
2. Learn how to write K6 performance tests for APIs using JavaScript.
3. Interpret performance test results accurately to identify important performance issues.​​​

Prerequisites for attending the workshop:
* Laptop
* Docker - The latest version should work. But if not, try Docker version 20.10.17, build 100c701.
* Text Editor or IDE. Such as VSCode
* Basic familiarity with JavaScript
* Windows Users A bash-style terminal. Such as https://cmder.app/

Creating a sample automated test, containerising it for repeatability, making a pipeline in Jenkins, retrieving test reports from the build and creating a dashboard from the test results.

For advanced learners, I can cover parameterisation, build triggers and integrating the testing pipeline within existing deployment pipelines.

Set up will include a list of pre-requisite tools that are required for the workshop, tools will be available in both Windows and Unix systems. I will be performing the follow-along demonstration on a Mac but also give guidance for Windows.

The creation of the test will be a basic API test in Jest, the aim here is to keep it simple as we're looking to provide the foundational breadth rather than a deep dive in to test writing.

I will discuss the value of containerisation for creating a consistent test environment before creating a container for our test to execute.

I will then demonstrate the creation of a CI pipeline, running the pipeline at various intervals to show how the steps are built up, I will be using the Jenkins groovy script here to create our pipeline scripts.

This will then lead on to the publication of results, retrieving them and creating a simple dashboard within Jenkins which can be used as an easily visible point of entry to our development teams.

Step by step worksheets will be provided, explaining what each part does.

I will also provide a sample demo repository with commits at certain milestones through the demo, so if someone falls too far behind they can keep pace, or if someone already knows the earlier steps, they can look-ahead and start to experiment with some more advanced functionality.

Key takeaways:

• How to lay out the foundations of a testing project within a CI/CD environment to ensure we have the basic breadth covered.
• The value of regular feedback cycles to the wider development team.
• The value of a T-Shaped skills profile

Pre-requisites for attending the workshop:

Bring your laptop with following tools/software installed:

• Node JS
• Jenkins
• Docker Desktop

Although these can be done during the session, it is recommended that you do this ahead of time to ensure maximum time on the workshop tasks.

Note: This workshop has lunch-break in-between