Quality Sense Podcast

In today's episode, I interviewed Anand Bagmar from India. He has more than 20 years of experience in the software industry and today he's a Quality Evangelist and Solution Architect at Applitools. In this episode, we will learn more about visual testing and how it can enhance your test automation. Of course, we talked about Applitools, which is one of the best tools for this kind of testing. If you are involved with or interested in test automation, you will learn some very important things about it, including the importance of following a value-based and risk-based approach.

Read the transcript of this episode here: https://abstracta.us/blog/podcast/visual-testing/

Get a free trial of Applitools: https://applitools.com/

Access courses to improve your test automation skills: https://testautomationu.applitools.com/

Follow Anand on Twitter: https://twitter.com/BagmarAnand

Today I will share with you a conversation with Andreas Grabner, or Andi as we all know him. From Austria, he has more than 20 years of experience in the field, always sharing his knowledge about performance engineering, especially through his podcast called Pure Performance. He is a frequent speaker at technology conferences, I think I’ve met him in every conference related to performance, in different countries.

During the interview we talked about why performance engineering is so enjoyable, also, we visited some basic concepts related to performance testing in Continuous Delivery, because I wanted to talk about Keptn, the open source project that Andi has been working on during the last couple of years. I really admire how Andi can explain a lot of very complex concepts easily. Without further ado, let’s listen to the full interview. Enjoy!

Episode highlights:

- Understanding SLAs, SLOs, SLIs, and Quality Gates

- How performance engineers can avoid becoming a bottleneck themselves

- Improve the quality of your software with self-service performance engineering using open source tool, Keptn

For more notes, links, and a transcript, go here: https://abstracta.us/blog/podcast/introduction-to-keptn/

Today, I'll share a conversation with Ian Goddard from the UK. He is a very experienced tester and public speaker. He’s been working in software testing and automation with products related to broadcasting, video streaming and most recently, in virtual reality, using your mobile phone or specific devices such as special lenses.

We discussed the challenges of testing this type of software which for me was something that I was very curious about. Let’s listen to this conversation!

For more notes, links, and a transcript, go here: https://abstracta.us/blog/podcast/testing-virtual-reality-software/

In today’s episode, I’ll be interviewing Bas Dijkstra, from the Netherlands. He’s an expert on test automation, offering training and consultancy therein. I’ve seen Bas trigger some very interesting conversations on Linkedin so I wanted to discuss them with him on the show. Listen to this episode if you want to learn more about how to deal with false positives and negatives in test automation and how a tester can contribute in unit testing efforts!

Episode highlights:

- What should a tester’s involvement look like in unit testing?

- How to become a better test automation specialist

- Building reliable automated tests: how to avoid false positives and negatives?

- An important philosophy/book he recommends for being more successful and productive

For more notes, links, and a transcript, go here: https://abstracta.us/blog/podcast/quality-sense-podcast-bas-dijkstra/

In this Quality Sense episode, I had a chat with Júlio de Lima, an engineer at Capco, who recently completed his master’s degree in Electrical Engineering and Computing (Artificial Intelligence) and also co-founded GaroaQA, a meetup group with four locations across Brazil and over 2,000 members.

Episode Highlights

- The complexity of analyzing the huge amounts of data that software performance tests provide

- Using machine learning to solve data issues by giving meaningful insights about what happened during test execution

- How he used K-means clustering, a machine learning algorithm, to reduce almost 300,000 records to fewer than 1,000 and still get good insights into load testing results

For related links and the transcript, check out this article: abstracta.us/podcast/julio-de-lima-machine-learning-performance-testing

Today, I’m going to share with all of you my conversation with Elisabeth Hocke, mostly known as Lisi Hocke. She’s a very recognized tester in the agile testing community, she won the award for “Most Influential Agile Testing Professional” in 2019. Also, you may know her for her approach to personal challenges, which will be our main topic of conversation today. We also discussed her recent article “I Am white” where she shared her thoughts and learning journey related to the privileges white people have over others and how to be more aware, learn more and act. I loved the whole conversation with Lisi. I hope you can learn something new from it, a new perspective or new questions to ask yourself, maybe, a new personal challenge. Enjoy!

For a transcript of this episode and relevant links, check: https://abstracta.us/blog/podcast/quality-sense-lisi-hocke-personal-challenges/

Today, I'll interview Mike Lyles. Even though we've been in contact for so many years, this was the first time we got the chance to finally speak. Mike is a director of QA and Project Management with over 25 years of IT experience. He has recently published a book called The Drive-Thru Is Not Always Faster, where you can learn a lot about leadership, and actually this is the main topic that we will be discussing today!

Episode highlights:

- How an excuse to go to Tampa, Florida resulted in Mike getting into software testing

- The difference between being a manager and being a leader

- Why he wrote a book and the journey that lead to it finally being published

- Why work-life balance is(or should be considered)a fantasy

- The power of social media to learn from others in the industry

See the transcript of this episode here: https://abstracta.us/blog/podcast/quality-sense-podcast-mike-lyles-testing-leadership/

Follow Mike on Twitter: https://twitter.com/mikelyles

Visit his book website: http://www.thedrivethrubook.com/

Quality Sense is back for season 2! Did you miss us? In this episode, I invited Fernanda Sesto, an entrepreneur, Rochester University student, and former Abstracta tester, to share a bit of what it was like for her to start working in testing at the ripe old age of 18!

Episode highlights:

- What she wished she knew when getting started in software testing

- What its like to work from Latin America for clients in the United States

- The differences between studying technology and actually working in it on the ground, in the real world

- Mistakes to avoid and tips for success in your first year of testing

Read the full transcript and more info here: https://abstracta.us/blog/podcast/fernanda-sesto-advice-getting-started-software-testing/

Connect with Fernanda on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fernanda-sesto/

One of the most beautiful lessons I’ve learned over the last few months? Podcasting is so much fun! Especially, when friends and colleagues (who happen to be people you admire) say yes to come on and share about what they know, about their experience, about what they are learning or even what they are struggling with.

In this Quality Sense episode, I want to give a short summary of what I’ve learned while talking with the great people that I had the chance to interview, to close out this first season.

Let me know who you want me to interview next.

See you soon!

In this episode I interviewed my Latin American brother, Leandro Melendez, from Mexico, also known as "Señor Performo." He's an expert on performance testing with almost 20 years of experience in the software industry. He frequently speaks at testing conferences and shares content about performance in his youtube channels and podcasts in English and Spanish. For example, he is one of the hosts of the PerfBytes Podcast(check it out here https://www.perfbytes.com/).

In this interview, we discussed about basic and complex concepts around performance testing sharing our war stories from the different projects we have participated.

For a full transcript, check out our blog: abstracta.us/blog/podcast/

Leandro commented about my Spanish book about software testing and also recommended some other performance testing books and habits, specially helpful in this current lock down situation.