Thoughts After Participating in JaSST
The Japan Symposium on Software Testing (JaSST) is a symposium on software testing held in Japan.
Hi, I am Rie Ota! I work as a test engineer at HENNGE K.K. and I have been interested in this symposium for a long time. In the past, it was difficult for me to participate in it for personal reasons, but now since it is held online due to COVID-19, I was finally able to attend.
In this article, I would like to summarize the two most memorable lectures during the event.
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From JaSST’20 Niigata, I would like to introduce the keynote speech by Takuto Wada(和田卓人 / タワーズ・クエスト).
Wada talked about “組織にテストを書く文化を根付かせる戦略と戦術 / Strategies and tactics to instill a culture of test writing in your organization.
He mentioned:
The sooner the lead time (development speed) and deployment frequency, the better. The shorter the lead time, the more frequent the verification demonstration process. And, the most important thing is how few defects there are and how quickly it takes to fix them after they occur (MTTR = Mean Time To Repair). The purpose of test automation is to achieve a short MTTR. In addition, he also said that there is no trade-off between development speed and quality.
The words that stuck in my mind were, “It’s not that I don’t have time to write tests, it’s that I don’t have time because I don’t write tests.” It certainly takes time to write test code, but in the long run, automating tests that used to be done manually for each release will create efficiency.
Incidentally, he said that after running tests four times, the cost of manual and automated testing will reverse.
I was convinced that test automation is now a must to improve the efficiency of development and release.
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From Jasst’21 Tokyo, I’d like to introduce “ AIの力でリリースサイクルを加速する / DevOps Testing: Accelerating the Release Cycle with the Power of AI”.
When writing tests, it is quite common to find that the existing tests no longer work due to UI changes. Furthermore, I nodded my head greatly when he said that he sometimes puts a “mysterious 1500ms wait” into the test to wait for the object to appear.
Automation of testing by AI was introduced as a means to solve these various problems. I was largely ignorant of the relationship between testing and AI. Autify, which he introduced in this talk, had the following three points:
- Automatically script operations
- AI maintains the code
- Plenty of browsers and actual devices in the cloud
Personally, I found 2 to be particularly novel. I found it very interesting because test code is not finished after it is created, but maintenance is a big part of it.
“Need to write test code -> but don’t have time to write it due to manpower issues” — It was very interesting to hear that test automation by AI could solve this dilemma.
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My final thoughts
What was emphasized in both talks was the importance of a fast release cycle in today’s world. I came out of the talk, with the reinforced belief that not only is testing essential for this cycle, it is no longer a separate “test” but an integral part of the development phase.
