Two of the hottest new topics in our industry are continuous testing and AI/machine learning. Today we’ll be test talking with Guljeet Nagpaul about next generation Agile automation. We’ll cover codeless test automation, improving Agile quality management and more. Guljeet worked for Mercury as head of their ALM practices back in the day, so he knows his stuff. Discover what has changed since that time, and what you need to know in today’s rapidly changing automation testing landscape.

About Guljeet Nagpaul

Guljeet is an accomplished leader with experience ranging from software engineer to leading platform and market strategy. Guljeet spent 10 years at Mercury where he was North America head for ALM practice. During this time, ALM captured the highest market share and Mercury was acquired by HP. He was a key leader in growing the ALM portfolio with Spydynamics and Shunra acquisitions amongst others.

Guljeet believes accelQ is the biggest breakthrough in Continuous Testing since the introduction of specialist ALM tools by Mercury. Guljeet lead’s the Product Strategy and Marketing. Guljeet holds a Masters in Management of Information Systems from Carnegie Mellon University.

Quotes & Insights from this Test Talk with Guljeet Nagpaul

• We’ve seen so much innovation in automation in deployment release build, these life cycles to align with the agile or the Continuous Integration or DevOps mode whatever we call it at the end of the day you want faster releases right. But testing has suffered kind of overhead.
• No matter whether you’re going for commercial tools or you are doing open source you know you’re reinventing the wheel of frameworks and then kind of chasing your automation code and the code maintenance and then API testing unfortunately still remains to be kind of in a completely different work. So you know a lot of these challenges like test design, framework overhead, API testing kind of not being able to embed as part of your end to end flow as well as you know it still remains to be you know very specialized function it needs like really senior development skills to be able to produce a good automation. So our goal was to take a step back and look at all of these challenges. Not just test case automation and silo and have a platform which connects all this. But then at the end of the day also have it connected to your business processes.
• If you really want to scale up your automation you can’t scale it up unless you have the power and flexibility and that’s what Selenium brought to the table. To give the power back into the tester’s hand. But it obviously comes with a pretty huge overhead of custom frameworks, automation design, chasing that code, maintenance and unless you write a series of perfect world frameworks you know the output of Selenium can drag you down.
• Interestingly when we talk about Continuous Delivery and Continuous Integration and I know a lot of organizations have a misconception that if they just align their automation suite to a CI tool that’s their job done. They’ve achieved continuous testing. But it’s really a lot more than that.
• So you can functionally virtualize your application. So that even while it’s under development you can start to write your automation logic, start writing your automation test suites so that you really get ahead of the curve right in terms of bringing that instant automation and not suffer a couple of sprints lag which you usually do.
• All I would say is — don’t jump into selecting an automation tool or a technology if you’re evaluating newer avenues or whether you may be you know going into automation as a new profession or whether you’re looking to adopt more and more automation for your organization. Look at it from a perspective of which solution brings in the most robustness in automation. Which can give me obviously the speed to align with my continuous delivery and then you know lastly most importantly don’t just look at web automation in a silo. Have a solution, these days the application architecture is complex enough to be selecting a solution which can handle your web to your file interactions, to your APIs, to your database all in a simple flaw without having to hire an army of developers to accomplish that.

Connect with Guljeet Nagpaul

• Website: accelq.com
• LinkedIn: guljeet
• Twitter: @accelq

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