Are you wondering what new automation and testing skills and tools you’ll need to know in 2019? Before my Automation Guild conference each year I ask potential attendees to fill out a survey to give me an idea of what things they’re struggling with. I also speak with a lot of testing thought leaders on my weekly Test Talks podcast. Based on this info we’ll take a look at trends for automation testing and how test automation will change in the New Year.

As organizations shift to a culture of intense collaboration and rapid delivery, the expectations for testers are changing. What does testing look like in an environment with automated build and deployment pipelines? How does appetite for risk change once a product can be tested in production? Who should testers look to connect with across the organization, and how can they work together effectively to deliver quality software? That's what we'll be test talking about in this episode with Katrina Clokie, author of the book A Practical Guide to Testing in DevOps.

There are many benefits of BDD, but most folks completely ignore them and just focus in on the automation piece of behavior-driven development. Living documentation, as well as communication, are often overlooked. In this episode that’s what we’ll be test talking about today with Laurent Py, founder of HipTest. Listen up and discover how to take your BDD to the next level in 2019.

Today we’ll be Test Talking with Casey Cantwell a Senior QA Architect about WebDriver.io Automation. This episode came about after I received an email from Casey who asked “In reading your blog post on “frameworks you need to know article” I was surprised to see a framework based on Node.js didn’t get any love in your article. We chose Webdriver.IO as our product is all Node.js / JavaScript and are loving it.” So I asked Casey if he would be open to being interviewed about his experiences with creating Node.js based automation frameworks. So that what will be test talking all about today.

If you’re like me you would have thought that Selenium IDE was long dead and buried. And to be honest, I was glad to believe it was. But in this episode, Dave Haeffner will Test Talk about the rebirth of Selenium IDE and why it’s a good thing. Discover why Selenium IDE was resurrected and how it can help you. Listen up and learn about all of Selenium IDE’s improvements, and how they have made it better than it ever was before.

Have you ever wondered what it must have been like to find the Rosetta stone—the key to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics?

In this episode, we’ll be Test Talking with Seretta Gamba about her new book, A Journey through Test Automation Patterns: One team’s adventures with the Test Automation Patterns Wiki that she co-authored with Dorothy Graham.

This book is like a testing Rosetta stone for anyone who is embarking on or is already developing automation testing scripts. Get clarity and actionable advice on test automation patterns to improve any automation testing situation you might find yourself in.

What is Continuous Testing? What does it mean to you and your team’s testing efforts? That's what we’ll be test talking about today in this episode with Ingo Philipp, a Distinguished Evangelist at Tricentis. Prepare to discover what the fundamentals of testing are, and why it’s all about information and not automation.

In this episode discover how to fuel up your performance testing efforts as we test talk with Andy Hawkes. Andy is the creator of a new performance test tools called Loadster. So listen up and discover how using Loadster can help you lower the barrier or entry for newbie performance test engineers and help find performance risk in your application before your customer does.

In this episode, we’ll be Test Talking with Zabil Maliackal, Gauge Product Manager at ThoughtWorks, about acceptance testing. If you're looking for an open-source automation framework that requires less code and less maintenance, and want to focus more of your efforts on the acceptance piece of testing, you don’t want to miss this episode.

As you know, the number of tools that leverage machine-learning algorithms to help with UI based software automation testing keeps increasing. But what about leveraging AI for helping in other areas, like test data management? That’s what we’ll be test talking about today with Bhavani R. In this episode Bhavani will share her insight on to how her team uses an open-source tool called WEKA to help her make predictions for her team’s test data activities, including test estimation, test coverage, and issue forecasting.

In this episode we’ll be test talking with Eran Sher, CEO and co-founder of SeaLights.io, about software quality analytics and why analytics are so important in today’s fast-paced software developing and testing world. Discover actionable tips on how to track and optimize your testing efforts to increase your team’s velocity without sacrificing quality.

Did you enjoy smashing sand castles when you were a kid? If so, it might explain why you’re about to listen to this podcast. In this episode we’ll test talk with computer scientist Noemi Ferrera about AR/VR/AI machine learning and game testing using the AirTest Project. Get ready to discover a bunch of actionable testing tips for newer technologies.

In today’s episode get ready to discover ReportPortal.io, an open-source, AI-powered Test Automation dashboard. We'll be test talking with Dzmitry Humianiuk, Product Manager at EPAM. Dzmitry will explain how ReportPortal.io can help you with acquiring, aggregating and analyzing test results to quickly determine the health of your test runs using machine learning.

In this episode, we’ll be Test Talking with Evan Wiley a Quality Engineer for a large financial company all about his experience on how to get that automation culture into sprint teams. So listen up to discover a whole bunch of real word experience around automation testing in action.

With the ability to experience VR on mobile devices and WebVR on the horizon, the potential for VR to go mainstream is huge. But what does this mean for testing? That’s what you'll discover in this episode as we TestTalk with BJ about VR and AR in Mobile Apps Testing. Prepare to discover how to deal with new test environments, configurations, and interfaces for testing virtual reality and augmented reality mobile apps.

As software continues to eat the world, it’s important to recognize the impact of poor quality software devouring your business. Apple’s bold step of identifying 2018 as the year of software quality is a call for other organizations to do the same. How is yours meeting this software quality challenge? In this episode, we’ll Test Talk with Shailesh Rao, current COO of BrowserStack. Shailesh has previously worked with Google to help develop and scale their Cloud Platform, and also led groups at SAP and Salesforce. Get ready to discover the State of Software Quality in 2018 and why it's more important than ever before.

Are you looking for ways to improve your continuous delivery testing process? Want to start incorporating new technologies like AI and machine learning to accomplish that? In this episode testing superstar and popular conference speaker Lisa Crispin, co-author of More Agile Testing: Learning Journeys for the Whole Team and Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams, will share her views and tips on testing and continuous delivery as well as what she’ll be doing in her new role as a testing advocate at Mabl. Don’t miss it!

In this episode, we’ll be test talking with the lazy coder Andrew Krug. Andrew just created a new resource called Selenium: Above and Beyond and that what well’’ be covering today. Get ready to discover a learning package that takes you beyond beginner level automaton and to a new level of automation awesomeness. Listen up and find out how to leverage your existing selenium scripts for performance testing, securing testing and more. Check it out.

In this episode we’ll be Test Talking with Julian Bucknall, the CTO at Developer Express about their open-source Web browser automation tool, TestCafe. Discover why TestCafe was created as well as how it can potentially help you and your teams with your test automation efforts.

I always hear about how most Ruby developers have embraced testing. So today we’re going to test talk about the Ruby Testing Culture from a developers perspective with Jason Sweet from codewithJason.com. Jason has a bunch of courses and articles on his blog about ruby testing, and he shares his testing knowledge on a whole bunch of topics with us today in this episode. Check it out.

Enterprise software needs to innovate quickly to stay competitive. Manual testing of APIs is inefficient. But many teams struggle to understand how to programmatically tests APIs. There are many tools out there but which one is right for you? Today we’ll be Test Talking with Patrick Poulin one of the founders of API Fortress a powerful API testing platform to help eliminate testing bottlenecks. In this episode, you’ll discover why you should add API Fortress to your list of API testing tools to check out.

How do you educate the other members of your team about your automation? How do you talk to management about automation? We sometimes focus so heavily on the tooling that we lose sight of what it is we’re trying to test. In this episode, we’ll Test Talk with Richard Bradshaw and Mark Winteringham about their new, imitative website, automationintesting.com. Discover how to be truly successful with your testing efforts by leveraging the right tools to help you test the right things.

With more and more companies moving away from centralization or standardization of their tools to conduct delivery of software it even harder to establish traceability for one artifact to the next across the entire organization That’s where the power of value stream integration comes in. In this episode, we’ll be Test Talking all about Value Stream Integration with Jeff Downs and Matt Angerer from Tasktop Technologies. Get ready to discover how you can dramatically improve the efficiency of your software development and delivery process.

Want to lower the performance testing barriers to help get your developers involved in testing? K6 is an open source, modern load testing tool that provides a clean, approachable scripting API, local and cloud execution, with command and control through CLI or a REST API using JavaScript. In this episode, you’ll discover developer-friendly performance tips as well as how k6 was developed to make the performance testing barrier to entry as smooth as possible for your developers.

In this episode, we test talk with the creator of Selenium Simon Stewart. Simon shares his view on the past, present, and future of the Selenium project. So get ready to discover how and why Selenium was created, AI, W3C, Simon’s approach to automation and more. Simon also reveals his top actionable advice around succeeding with automation.

Want a way to create quicker, more reliable functional tests without the overhead of a full-blown UI test? Do you want to develop functional tests that can also be used as performance tests later in the software development lifecycle? If so, this episode is for you. We’ll be Test Talking with Klaus and Dave from Blaze Meter about API functional testing and the benefits you’ll get by using this approach to software testing.

Are you looking for a way to quickly create a disposable, flexible, container-based Selenium Grid infrastructure that has features like video recording, live preview, basic auth & online/offline dashboards? If so than this episode is for you. Diego Molina, one of the Selenium core committers, official maintainer of the Docker-Selenium project and the creator of Zalenium, shares his automation knowledge.

In this fast-paced world of Agile and continuous testing, the need for test leaders has never been higher. So if you are responsible for creating a testing practice for your company or team--and managing the process and people--this episode is for you. Anna Royzman, founder of A Quality Leadership Institute and creator of the Test Leadership Congress and ConTest, will share some of the critical test leadership skills you’ll need to help lead your team with testing. You’ll discover how to influence your co-workers to adopt successful quality practices, report team progress and foster a “whole team” approach to quality.

Facing Software Quality Issues? Announcing an Online Conference for Testers by Testers. 20 + Experts Reveal Their Top Software Testing & QA Secrets. Join the first-ever Testing Guild an online conference and community dedicated 100% to helping YOU with your Testing & QA efforts https://testingguild.com

Integration Testing is often one of the toughest parts of the software development lifecycle--so in this episode we’ll test talk with James Penning of Get-Testy.com about the Top 5 Pitfalls when Writing Integration Tests, some tips for .NET testers, and more testing awesomeness.

Finding the right testing tool from all the available automation testing tools is tough. I’ve interviewed over 200 testers and developers on my TestTalks and based on this treasure trove of test automation awesomeness; I created an Ultimate Testing Tools list. Since Publishing it, I’ve gotten a bunch of comments asking why Katalon Studio was not on the list. So I decided to create an episode all around Katalon Studio with automation testing expert Raghav Pal.

In this episode, Henrik Rexed from Neotys joins us to test talk about how he’s helping to spread the gospel of performance testing earlier on the development lifecycle. Discover what the Performance Advisory Council is all about as well as how to join the online PAC events to learn more about the latest in performance testing.

The most significant challenge for an app team in today’s Agile, Continuous Integration (CI), and DevOps-driven world is just making sure the app still works like it did yesterday. There isn’t enough time to manually test each build, let alone craft test automation. Even when teams do try to test, it adds days of delay and thousands of dollars of cost, and yet the team is still not happy with the results. In this episode, Jason Arbon explains how Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning can solve this problem, and many others

In the digital economy of today, every business is a software business, and how we create software is forever changing. So if you’re looking to learn where software development and testing is heading, listen up. In this episode Jonathon Wright (The Automation Cyborg) shares his vision of Intelligent Process Automation and how it has already helped numerous companies begin to make the shift towards the future he foresees.

Welcome to the 200th episode of TestTalks. Thanks for your listening awesomeness! Rather than make this milestone episode all about me -- I wanted to talk more about Sauce Labs and all the innovation you’ve been up to. And remind folks that Sauce Labs’ sponsorship is what enables me to continue doing this week after week. So listen up and discover why I’m proud to have Sauce as my exclusive sponsor.

Apple introduced it's UI Testing framework (XCUITest) at WWDC 2015. The XCUITest framework enabled UI Tests to be written in Swift, Apple's own programming language, which can be understood by both QA and Developers to bridge the technology gap. In this episode, Shashikant goes over why he thinks native automation for iOS apps might be a better option than Appium or Calabash. He also goes over other tips on automating in Apple’s iOS ecosystem.

Developing software always involves dealing with unknowns. Unanticipated issues and changes always tend to creep in during development. But how do you deal with the unknown when planning your sprints? How do you handle unforeseen bugs? In this episode, we’ll Test Talk with Kinga Witko, who’ll offer some tips for dealing with the unknowns, accessibility testing and more.

Is your team doing behavior-driven development but having issues realizing the full potential of this approach? In this episode Gaspar Nagy, creator of Specflow and co-author of the book Discovery: Explore Behavior Using Examples, discusses why BDD exists in the first place and shares proven techniques and tips for getting the most out of your BDD collaboration between the business and your delivery team members.

Happy Easter - No Episode This Week

Do you want to discover how to perform the fastest, least expensive testing you can while still completely fulfilling the mission of testing? In this episode Michael Bolton, the world-renowned software tester, teacher, and co-author of Rapid Software Testing shares a testing mindset that will forever change the way you think about testing.

In this episode Kent C. Dodds, a full stack Javascript engineer at Paypal (as well as an instructor on egghead.io, Frontend Masters, Workshop.me and an open source enthusiast), discusses JavaScript test automation using tools like Jest and Cypress. Kent will also share best practices for developing software that is testable, as well as ways to help make testing part of your company’s culture.

Our world is changing. Artificial intelligence is being employed in nearly every walk of life, from virtual assistants to self-driving cars. How will this new way of life impact software testing? What is our role…if there even is one? In this episode, Angie Jones will lead the way into the future for testers by sharing the skills you’ll to know for testing AI-based technologies.

In this episode Mike Talks shares insights from his years of texting experience. Discover testing tips and techniques like biscuit testing, the scientific approach to testing, how to test fighter jets and more.

One thing I’ve seen teams struggle with is including Performance Testing earlier in their software development lifecycle. In this episode we’ll talk with Paola Rossaro, CTO of Nouvola about how performance testing can become part of your continuous deployment life cycle, helping you achieve faster deployment of scalable applications.

In this episode, we’ll be Test Talking with Michael “Fritz” Fritzius, the founder of Arch DevOps, about model-based testing. Discover what model-based testing is, how it works, when to use it and who's a good candidate for it.

Today we’ll be test talking with the creator of the Citrus Integration Testing Framework, Christoph Deppisch. Citrus is an open source solution that was developed to help you automate integration tests for pretty much any messaging protocol or data format. So if you’re looking to expand your automation efforts beyond lame, flaky, UI-based automated tests, this episode is for you.

Twenty percent of the population has impairments that make it difficult for them to use your application. What are you doing about it? Functional testing an app is not enough. In this episode, Manoj Kumar will discuss some ways to add accessibility testing to your suite. Manoj will also explain what accessibility testing actually is, and will outline some tools and techniques that can make your development process more inclusive and will help you create apps that will delight your customers.

Ever wonder who started the whole Selenium test automation thing? In this episode, we Test Talk with the father of Selenium, the Elon Musk of test automation, Jason Huggins. Jason shares how he started Selenium and founded Sauce Labs and Tapster Robotics. Prepare to enter the automation Matrix as Jason shares his vision of robots and test automation for the future.

Are you looking for a clear path to mobile testing greatness but not sure how to get there? Need some best practices or guidelines on how to make your Appium automation awesome? In this episode, Jonathan Lipps, one of the key contributors to Appium, makes a BIG announcement and reveals a must-have Appium resource. Listen up and discover how to succeed with Appium Test Automation.

In this episode, we recap the 2018 Automation Guild Conference and Community that occurred the week of Jan 8 -10. Here are some quick takeaways as well as insight into how the guild conference continues to evolve to help you create automation awesomeness.

In this episode, we test talk with Angie Jones, Richard Bradshaw, and Gil Tayar all about what automation trends they think that will dominate our work environment in 2018. We also cover what major skills are in high demand when hiring test engineers, and the tools and best practices required to help you deliver software faster and better.