Automated Testing 101
One of the most relevant tasks on a software project is the quality assurance - we are building a product, and we want to deliver it with the highest level of quality, while keeping the budget on its limits. The bad part here is, doing quality checks is a repetitive task, and all the application features should be checked each time a new piece of code is added - unfortunately, this is not generally done: only the new code is checked, so the chances to have a regression bug is there, and, yes, it happens often.
Additionally, when thinking on QA, what comes to mind is testing the functionality, but, after all, software quality involves some other aspects of the product that should be taken care of (like security, accessibility, performance, scaling, etc.). Of course, all this sounds great, but on the Real World™, there is not enough time to check everything that should be checked before deploying code to production. How easy would be to have all the checks ready to be executed each time they are needed, and what about having all the aspects of the software covered on these checks? Enter the automated testing.
This session will review the current state of the art about test automation, talking about the most useful tools to provide these capabilities to your project, giving some advice about best strategies to implement automated testing for your application, and how to cover relevant aspects of your software (not only functionality!).
Intended Audience & Skill Level
Everyone interested on learning the basics of automated testing is welcome to attend, and they will learn a bit about which tools you can use to create your tests, how to integrate them on your project's life cycle, how to execute them automatically on each build, and some other questions that a novice on this topic may need to answer.
As this is a barely introduction session, there is no minimum skill level you need to attend - just some interest on automated testing is required!
About the speaker
My name is Ezequiel "Zequi" Vázquez, and I am a developer at Lullabot. I am a web engineer specialized in PHP & Drupal development, with strong background on DevOps, virtualization & cloud computing. I am highly interested on high performance & availability, and IT security is one of my passions.
I have been speaker on four DrupalCamp Spain editions, Drupal Dev Days 2017 and DrupalCon Europe 2015, and I usually collaborate with local meeting groups and local universities to talk mainly about web security and Drupal.