Learning Organisation — Open secret to Success
Being a “Consulting org” with “passion to solve testing problems through tech” — key to success is continuous learning. This is no secret. Investments in this direction needs to be small, incremental and continuous.
“Develop a passion for learning. If you do, you will never cease to grow.”
- Anthony J. D’Angelo
Here are few cool stuffs we did at TestVagrant last year
Embracing JavaScript Family
Web development has been dominated by variety of JavaScript Front-end Frameworks & they are on rise. Whereas the test automation market is flooded with Java & Selenium combination. These two wont gel well & need test automation to align with that of dev stack for boosting efficiency and effectiveness
The automated tests must be built with the same tech used to build the product’s front-end & tests are assets of the team
Our goal was to enable half of the org with JavaScript/TypeScript stack automating web apps, mobile apps and APIs. A bunch of passionate vagrant’s created and executed comprehensive program to make it a reality. 4 of our clients are on JavaScript/TypeScript & Cypress — and growing
Project Ekam (Ekam is the Sanskrit is “one, single, solitary”)
Project Ekam has two goals :
- Translate the collective knowledge gained over the years into reusable testing artefact
- Use these artefacts to kickstart a new engagements and produce results from day one. This brings a great value proposition to our clients where we cut-off approximately 3 months of preparatory/ramp up efforts
Don’t repeat yourself
Progress of Optimus to Cloud
One of the learnings we had on Optimus was packaging. We had a CLI based approach which was some effort, however we moved to containers to simplify and made it no-brainer. In this process we re-wrote core components in service based architecture. With all these efforts Optimus now can be deployed in cloud infrastructure with ease.
Now QA engineers can focus only on test case authoring & leverage all the features of Optimus with minimum effort.
We now support — Python & JavaScript clients along with Java
How is it done? Series
Pockets of knowledge are being created as we work with different clients. However this knowledge needs a channel to propagate in rest of the org. How is it done? series brings two parties on the stage and talk about a specific problem they have solved. An open discussion & debate leads to sharing of knowledge. The takeaways are then applied by others in their engagements.
Podcasts
Podcasts are a great way to share perspectives and knowledge. With internal podcasts, we are building a platform to share our experiences and experiments we did while assuring quality for different clients. This helps us in cross sharing of knowledge.
DPL (Design Pattern League)
Design patterns are very common and widely accepted in software development. The goal of DPL was to learn, apply, adopt & simplify common problems in test automation. We explored different types of design patterns available — is to helping reduce code complexities & creates pockets of reusable code. A bunch of passionate vagrant’s created and executed comprehensive program to make it a reality
Assurance framework
Quality is no different
Quality is natural consequence of engineering practices. Take care of engineering practices & Quality will happen.
Often, the engineering practices are compromise for variety of reasons. Assurance framework is an initiative to capture, measure, assess & enhance the engineering practices thereby quality is built within the product & while product is under development.
Bloggers challenge
Writing is a hard, however it has to begin somewhere. The bloggers challenge was aimed at techies (and budding bloggers) to start writing their ideas and solutions on Tech, Culture, Hiring or any other topic of interest.
These initiatives wouldn’t have happened with passionate Vagrant’s. Thank you everyone for your efforts and contribution in making TestVagrant a continuous learning org.
