Today we’ll be Test Talking with Cassandra Leung about her upcoming presentation at Agile Testing Days on 5 Ways Automation is Like Sex and Why your Careers Isn’t Doomed Without it. Cassandra shares her experience with automation and addresses many of the false claims, and misunderstanding managers and testers may have about automation. So get ready to discover how to have more pleasurable testing experiences with or without automation.

About Cassandra H. Leung

Cassandra has taken what she likes to call a “scenic route” into testing, with previous roles including product owner, business analyst, recruiter and international account manager. Very pleased to now be focusing on testing, she has recently started a new adventure with MaibornWolff in Munich, Germany.

With less than two years’ testing experience, Cassandra still feels quite new to the field and says she still has lots to learn but hasn’t let that stop her from getting involved in the testing community and sharing her experiences.

Cassandra speaks at conferences and writes blogs as a way to learn, engage with other people (testers and non-testers alike), and hopefully, inspire others to share their stories too.

Quotes & Insights from this Test Talk

• Obviously, the title is 5 Ways Automation is Like Sex but the tagline for it is really important as well it’s And why your career isn’t doomed without it. So I’m more targeting this talks towards So so-called manual taster’s who maybe don’t use automation in their testing at the moment or he don’t want to get into writing it and feel the pressure to do it.
  
• So the first point and this is probably the most obvious one — all the cool kids are doing it. When you’re in high school you know all the other cool people and all the popular kids are talking about their experiences or encounters that are probably actually made up. From my own experience and I’m from reading other people’s experiences with Automation as well. It seems that companies are doing something very similar when it comes to automation. They are claiming and that they are also doing it because of course tech companies and software companies they always describe themselves as being a little forward thinking at the front of the field if they’re seen as not doing something that is very popular at the moment and it’s going to make them look as if you know all those things that they want to be in
  
• And I think that with my previous experience in recruitment I can’t forget that I have this insider information of I know how the job descriptions became to be so strange compared to what the hiring managers are actually looking for it. And one of the main reason why it changes so much and is because there’s usually someone in between. Even if the hiring manager writes an advert themselves there’s usually like an internal H.R. person or internal recruiter. Even an external recruiter who will change that. For whatever reason.And they never have done a role like that. Or maybe not specializing in that area or whatever. They don’t realize that Selenium doesn’t automation mainframes
  
• There’s a lot of misinformation. You heard a lot of some weird stuff about sex. And I think there was a lot of misunderstanding and a lot of spreading misinformation. But again I think that the same is pretty much true automation and it even reminds me or you know what Agile and BDD. People say that they’re doing it in when you look into it you say “What is this?” that’s not what is this.
  
• By saying software development. You know before I came into this technology industry before I even knew that testing really was was a job. If I heard software development I’d be a little oh software development is developing software. Who does that? Developers. It’s a natural sort of flow. But in actual fact, as we know you know that there are a lot more people who are involved in building a piece of software together developers, testers, product owners, business analyst you know the customers themselves who are having input on that. All sorts of people and who just aren’t really implied in any way at all with the phrase software development, But “software production”. Yes, it is because there are so many things that do in so many other people involved other developers.
  
• I think that probably the most practical and easily doable piece of advice I would have for people to improve their testing is to really get involved in the community.
  

Resources

• Agile Testing Days
• Sexy Music by : www.bensound.com

Connect with Cassandra H. Leung

• Twitter:@Tweet_Cassandra
• Blog: cassandrahl.com/blog
• LinkedIn: cassandrahl

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