Columbus or Bust Another year and another good conference at OSU. Metrics & Measurements We have been working at Miami coming up with masurements and metrics that we can use to show that we are improving and getting better as an organization. So I wanted to point out a few tracks that really spoke to me and ones that I will definately be bringing back to Miami to share with others.

Starting Small but remember it will go bigger I’m just starting to learn how to write and run some tests so lets just run them on my computer. I don’t need a big hub and several nodes to run hundreds of tests at a time lets just begin running one test at a time. So I want to start my automated testing adventure by verifying that a form launches correctly.

Since there is just one of you, you should just automate everything A few days after I started this position last year, this was something that I heard regularly from my upper-management. You should start testing “X” we get lots of updates for that so you should automate the tests for that. This is coming from people who have never tested anything, and definately have no clue what it means to create automated tests.

Continuing into the World of learning new things Back in my developer days I checked out Selenium, but from what I learned at the conference, that was back in their infant days. From what I saw at the conference Selenium has come a long way and it has only just begun. Pre-Conference Workshop I was lucky enough to be able to attend a pre-conference workshop on getting started with Selenium. Some basic stuff was covered but it was a real good overview and very helpful on getting started with Selenium.

Location, Location, Location For those of you who don’t know Miami University is about 1 hour north of Cincinnati, OH - not in Florida like some may think. So now that we have established where Miami is and where I work for that matter, when I tell you that the QA or The Highway Conference is located in Columbus, OH, which according to Distance Between Cities its only 118 miles by car, which is like a nice day trip.

Training Time So here I am, Orlando, FL. The Sunshine state, and I get to spend my whole time here training rooms. I arrived in Orlando, last night to spend the next 6 days learning about testing and what my job means. I get to learn from others, see what they are doing and just get a better overall understanding of how to bring a department of developers up to the place where they can test.

Where to start As a techie, when you have a question where do you start? Google of course. So I took to googling everything. Software testing Web testing test frameworks Unit tests Cucumber Testing Starting a QA team etc. You name it I probably tried to search on it. Now this wasn’t a one day affair, I mean I probably took several days googing things and going down rabbit holes and rabbit holes until I started to find sites that were useful and provided me with some information that was useful.

Where to start As my new job begins, I wonder how this job will be different then my life as a developer. I have been a developer for as long as I know. Developer @ Miami University for 15 years. This will be a big adjustment, instead of creating code, I now get to discover the bugs in the code. Atleast I know good places to look. I look forward to the automation I am able to help create the build and deployment.