Dec 9, 2021

Tech Talks With Paul Grossman

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6 min read

Understanding Modernization Of QA & Software Testing Trends

With software and application technology getting more diverse, the entire concept of Quality assurance services has been redefined. Especially, the growing need for business digitization and rapidly changing needs of the customer have all pushed the developers and testers to explore the deepest secrets of the tech world.

Since Quality Assurance is one of the most dynamic and crucial part of digital transformation drive, we at BugRaptors always try to foster innovation that can cater the diversifying requirements. With that objective, we frequently aim to connect with people from the QA world and find out new and advanced thought process that can help the world to enjoy better technology.

As technology these days have expanded to almost every industry, beginning from healthcare, transportation, banking, finance, retail, telecommunication, utility, social media, manufacturing and almost every sector and venture on the earth, we believe interactions are the only way that can strengthen the QA goals.

This time, our expert, Sandeep Vashisht, VP Quality Assurance had an interesting talk with Paul Grossman. Paul is a lead software test engineer with rich experience of more than 20 years. Paul has been recognized as the Game Master of the 2021 British Computer Society’s Bug Bash recently and has varying experiences of working on different QA projects and models.

He is an AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner who has even worked on designing an Automation Framework for a leading medical device manufacturer and demonstrated a $2,000,000 return on investment by replicating just three defects. Paul has even worked on designing the Magic Object Model for UFT and Selenium for reduced test creation time and maintenance.

More importantly, he has all the experience designing TDD Automation Frameworks in QuickTest Professional for Redbox (Outerwall), NORC at Univ. of Chicago, Victoria’s Secret, FTD, Abbott Labs, and Grainger. He is a Conference Speaker at Automation Guild 2018, QCAA, HP Discover, QAAM, PSQT, and Mercury World, and also the instructor at International Institute for Software Testing. On top of that, he has all the QA expertise gathered from HP Quality Center implementation, administration, customization and automated test integration.

Besides, he has got great command of Automated Functional testing with Quick Test Professional 9.5 - 14.54. Also, he has all the knowledge to handle Creative solutions for AJAX synchronization, generic object identification, and visualization.

Without taking much time, let us quickly jump on the interview to find out what he has to say on QA modernization and explore his perspective on advanced software testing.

What is the most interesting bug you've found in your career?

The “Reset Password” page would randomly crash. Turns out the requirement called for “a new password string of 12 random ASCII characters.”

The developer randomized all 128 ASCII characters. Many were weird symbols and a few were invisible like BELL and TAB. But when a square bracket was generated, it was interpreted as the beginning or end of a HTML tag, crashing the page.

What’s the biggest challenge you’re facing in your role right now and how are you tackling it?

The death of the Fibers project this Summer has severely impacted the JavaScript WebdriverIO framework @sync dependency. This has forced all WDIO developers to touch more than 90% of their existing code. Adding Async () to every method and Await to every line of code that has a browser interaction.

We are tackling it by changing and testing every line of code in six projects. There is no way to modularize this.

It has only furthered my long-held opinion that open-source automation tool sets that are dependent on other open-source projects are far more expensive in the long run than licensed self-contained tools.

What’s your take on modernization of Quality Assurance?

Products like Applitools Eyes are now delivering on the promise of AI image validation. Add to that younger SDETs are not jaded by the experience of poor feature performance from most tools attempting this same feat 20 years ago.

The same is happening with Low-Code and No-Code tools. Platforms like testRigor and Test Project can now automate most standard assertions without having to build another abstraction layer in code like Cucumber.

While this might scare some SDETs, I for one, embrace it. These tools allow SDETs and Manual Testers to cover more gaps in testing together.

Recently a requirement asked to confirm a message appeared for anyone still using Internet Explorer to upgrade to a modern browser. We are primarily a Mac shop

so how does this get done?

The test was built in 5 minutes in plain English using testRigor. 10 minutes later we were also able to confirm nine-edge test cases. Spinning up combinations of four modern browser in Mac, Windows, and Linux in the cloud.

What is the best way to increase the visibility of your test automation?

Demos. Every chance we get. In a recent meeting I skipped the traditional three minutes of hold music while we wait for people to join the room. Instead, I showed had a live view of my desktop covered with five concurrent browsers executing test cases.

How do you keep up with current technology trends?

I submit papers to conferences where I speak. Then I make time to listen to other speakers. That’s how I became aware of Intrusion Testing Orchestration solutions like Zero North in Boston. The pandemic has made most conferences significantly affordable.

There are also podcasts like Joe Colantonio’s Test Guild and Jonathan Wright’s QA Lead.

I also carve out time each week to complete a challenge in any number of automation courses I have purchased from Udemy.

I also set challenges for myself with tools to see how much time it takes to accomplish a goal under Clojure, React, Vue and other website architectures.

What would your big tip be for the readers?

Nowhere is it written you must build your automation framework in the language used by the application developers.

Building a framework in Java with Spring-boot is far more expensive in terms of time and skill level than performing the same actions in VBScript with Micro Focus UFT, Smart Bear Test Complete or in plain English with testRigor.