A Journey Through Test Automation Patterns

Dorothy Graham & Seretta Gamba

Test Patterns

This is a guide to Test Automation Patterns.  This eBook is taken from “A Journey through Test Automation Patterns”, by Seretta Gamba and Dorothy Graham, published on Amazon.

This extract from the popular book on Test Automation explores a particular scenario that opens up the conversation and opportunity for you to explore the world. In this eBook we meet Liz, who thought she had just landed the best job ever, but at the end of her first week, is thoroughly discouraged. What went wrong? She bumps into Jack, her test automation mentor at a previous company, hoping he can help her, as indeed he does. In the second chapter of the eBook we follow Liz journey as Jack introduces her to the Test Automation Patterns. Liz struggles at first to use this wiki, but Jack helps her through, and together they come up with a possible way forward for Liz (and Jack has to restrain her enthusiasm for her “pet” project).The free wiki referenced in the book is hosted by EuroSTAR and is at TestAutomationPatterns.org

Test Automation Patterns is a wiki dedicated to understanding and highlighting processes in test Automation. The story of the wiki started in 2012 when the book Experiences of Test Automation was published, a collection of automation case studies, collected, edited and commented on by Dorothy Graham and Mark Fewster. Seretta Gamba contributed Chapter 21: Automation through the back door. When she read the other chapters, she thought: “there are patterns here!” As a developer, she was already familiar with development patterns. She initially wrote them up as a book in Word, and asked Dorothy to help; Word proved to be unworkable for the interconnected issues and patterns, so the idea of the wiki was born.

Key Takeaways:

• Learn how Liz and you can use test automation patterns to help with your (common) automation problems.

• Learn how best to use the patterns wiki, and what to do if it doesn’t seem to help as you thought it might

• Get to know Liz and the team, and be entertained and educated by their successes – and failures.

About Me!

Dorothy Graham has been in software testing for over 40 years, and is co-author of 4 books: Software Inspection, Software Test Automation, Foundations of Software Testing and Experiences of Test Automation, and currently helps develop Test Automation Patterns. Dorothy has been on the boards of conferences and publications in software testing, including programme chair for EuroSTAR (twice). She was a founder member of the ISEB Software Testing Board and helped develop the first ISTQB Foundation Syllabus. She was awarded the European Excellence Award in Software Testing in 1999 and the first ISTQB Excellence Award in 2012.

Seretta Gamba has forty years’ experience in development and fifteen in test automation. After going through all the usual developer roles, in 2001 she was put in charge of test automation for her current company. She developed a framework that enabled her company to quickly get excellent results. After having talked about the framework at a couple of conferences, she met Dorothy Graham and was invited to write a chapter in the book Experiences of Test Automation. With Dorothy she has been developing the Test Automation Patterns Wiki and is now writing a story book about the patterns.


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