A Hero's Journey: Manual tester to automated QA

Once Upon A Time in Software
Once there was a project that was frustrating, it had lots of bugs and made the team unhappy. For the next project, we tried something new: the QA on the team would learn C# and she would write automated tests before the developers started coding. The team was happy, and the app runs to this day with only bugs caused by bad data the client told us could never exist. The end.

Or is it really... The Beginning?

This talk is the story of a learning quest, what I've discovered along the way teaching QAs to write test automation in Java, C#, and JavaScript, and my own journey of picking up new languages for fun, like Elixir. It is aimed at QA testers who want to broaden their testing skills, and at developers who want to help them get there. No prior coding knowledge is required for the QAs.

Transcript

1. Alison Hawke @BritishKoalaTea Manual tester to Automation QA
2. Once Upon A Time in Software
4. Your quest, should you choose to accept it
6. Better trolling conversations
10. Pseudo-code
11. Hero’s training montage
12. Write Run Remove suck
13. Power-ups, dragons, wizards, and gold
15. Your first few quests
16. TDD repos for JavaScript and Elixir https://github.com/britishkoalatea
21. TDD repos for JavaScript and Elixir https://github.com/britishkoalatea
22. The post-battle tavern-debrief
24. Be specific
25. Happily, ever after, for everyone
28. Resources referenced: https://gist.github.com/BritishKoalaTea