That’s right, Test Automation University (TAU) is holding a conference! It’ll be a two-day virtual event from March 8–9, 2023 hosted by Applitools. We will sharpen our software quality skills as we go all-in for the testing community. This article gives you nine reasons why you should attend this awesome event.

#1: Find out what’s new with TAU

TAU is alive and kicking, and we’ve got some incredible new developments in the works. In my opening keynote address, I’ll dish out all the details for upcoming courses, community engagements, and learning paths. There might even be a few surprises!

#2: Sharpen your skills with tutorials

Our first day will be stacked with six two-and-a-half-hour tutorials so you can really hone your automation skills. Want to stack up Cypress and Playwright? Filip Hric and I have you covered. Need to drop down to the API layer? Julia Pottinger’s got the session for you. Unit testing? Tariq King will help you think inside the box. Wanna crank it up with load and performance testing? Leandro will show you how to use k6. How about some modern Selenium with visual testing? Anand Bagmar’s our man. It’s the perfect time to sharpen your skills.

#3: Hear inspiring talks from our instructors

There’s no doubt that our TAU instructors are among the best in software testing. We invited many of them to share their knowledge and their wisdom on our second day. Our program is designed to inspire you to step up in your careers.

#4: Test your testing skills

Want to challenge your testing skills together with your other TAU classmates? Well, Carlos Kidman will be offering a live “testing test,” where everyone gets to submit answers in real time. The student with the highest score will win a pretty cool prize, so be sure to study up!

#5: Algorave at the halftime show

Have you ever listened to algorithmically-generated music that is coded live in front of you? It’s an experience! Dan Gorelick will kick out the algorave jams during our halftime show. (Glow sticks not included.)

#6: Cram even more content with lightning talks

Lightning talks bring bite-sized ideas to the front stage in rapid succession. They’re a welcome change of pace from full-length talks. We’ll have a full set of lightning talks from a few of our instructors along with a joint Q&A where you can ask them anything!

#7: Compete in extracurricular games

Every university needs some good extracurricular activities, right? We’ll have a mid-day game where you, as members of the audience, will get to participate! We’re keeping details under wraps for now so that nobody gets an unfair advantage.

#8: Win awards like a homecoming champion

What would a celebration be without superlative awards? We will recognize some of our best instructors and students in our closing ceremony. You might also win some prizes based on your participation in the conference!

#9: Get your conference tickets for FREE!

Applitools is hosting the 2023 TAU Conference as a free community event for everyone to attend. Just like our TAU courses, you don’t need to pay a dime to participate. You don’t even need to be a TAU student! Come join us for the biggest block party in the testing community this year. Register here to reserve your spot.

Where to start from?

If you are a new manager or willing to be promoted to a managerial role, you could start from the following options:

•  Research the role fully and understand what your deliverables, career progression, and path look like.
• Look for some management training internally/externally to see if this is the right “future” role for you.
•  Speak to existing managers and see what their thoughts are, where did they start from, and if they have any tips or if you could shadow them with a task or two.
• Attend talks/listen to podcasts from existing managers and see if you like the sound of the role.

The above steps could help you land on your dream job.

“There are over 1,583,412 managers currently employed in the United States. 49.0% of all managers are women, while 51.0% are men. The average age of an employed manager is 44 years old.”

Zippia

Furthermore, something to be more involved with could be understanding and establishing a leadership philosophy within your practise and seeing what the future of this practise is. Focusing on the day to day of management and leadership in your current role/remit is also a starting point. Be clear about your communication and top priorities as this will also help you engage better as a manager. Setting common values and common standards will also add to your role and the most important thing, IT IS OK TO BE SCARED/VULNERABLE or even go through Imposter Syndrome. Every manager I have come across is not perfect. There is no such thing as a perfect manager. However, a manager must not only focus on technical deliveries but also be a people’s person first and foremost. It’s all about the team and with the team you make the dream work successfully and confidently.

Traits to adopt

Be a good coach because this role is not just about excelling and delivering, but also coaching those who would work with you or aspire to have a similar role in the near future. Coaching is so beautiful. It’s amazing how we can ask open-ended questions and untangle individuals to reach their answers in a quicker manner.

Express interest/concern for team members’ success and personal well-being, because it’s about your team. It’s vital to celebrate your team as well as focus on their well-being. We work day in and day out, sometimes we forget to take a break. Sometimes I have my team members come up to me asking me if there is any other piece of work, I just tell them “use this time for self-learning, relax, and enjoy this free time”. Something as simple as this brings a smile on their faces. The world is changing, and I feel we should move with it. Never fall into the trap of micro-management. Trust, value, and celebrate your team.

Aim for a productive and results-orientated managerial way of working. This will help you showcase your teams, your work, and your ways of working. Serve as an example. Sometimes we delve into deliverables too much and have no time to showcase any of the results we achieve. To get good results, we also need to work on a process/strategy to get us what we are aiming to reap.

Empower the team and do not micromanage. I think this is self-explanatory. If you empower your team, it’s very common to see the results you all want to see whether that’s winning more projects to test, great testing feedback, or your WoW being commendable. Micromanaging doesn’t get us anywhere but at the doorstep of HR. Whereas being sociable as a manager gives your organization a friendly face, making employees feel more secure at work. Happy members of staff work harder, and are less likely to produce substandard results because they are just trying to get through the day.

Be a good communicator and listen and share the right information. When you come to know something vital for your team, make sure to communicate and involve them. Allow them to also express their thoughts. Differences in every team exist, but you call that a great team. Not everyone has to have to think in the same manner, which might help trigger an important issue no one else could think of. Also, listening to everyone, making time for this task is another super important trait. It’s not always about doing but also listening.

Just like you became a manager, your team would also have career aspirations, therefore help the team with their objectives and career development with the right training paths, learnings, and experiences.

As I mentioned earlier there is no perfect/right type of manager. It’s all about your learnings, skillset, and expertise to excel within this role. You can obviously adapt the above and excel more.

The importance of being a People Manager

“This position allows you to ‘sense’ every member of the team as well as the shape of the team itself. Sensing all members refers to the first statement above, getting to know your team members, listening to them, understanding who they are, how they feel, how they fulfill their part of the work within the team.”

Jean-Philippe Grenet

Effective people management can improve morale and employee engagement, reduce turnover, and enhance communication throughout teams. Furthermore, being there for your team means you can optimise productivity, engage employees, and develop a culture of innovation.

A good leader gets to know their team and makes time for them, whether that’s for some feedback, general chat, or even a serious topic. When an employee is going through something in their personal or professional life, extending empathy and compassion is a very ensuring act from a manager. It helps bring focus and value within a team.

Remember also to give and receive feedback. As a leader, your team is working with you to support the mindset and quality delivery you and the entire team have planned and had an input in. Feedback is expected and is an excellent way to revert back to members on how they are doing. Sometimes feedback can be a little difficult to deliver if it’s not all positive, but which team is 24/7 and every year working as a star team? Perhaps, choose a different place other than the office to speak to a team member and provide them with some guidelines, support, and time. On the other hand remember to take feedback too, on how your team feels you are working with them. It’s a two-way process. 

Therefore, being there for your team would lead to effective people management and can help boost employee retention, employee engagement, and organisational effectiveness.

Conclusion

A manager in my eyes is one who not only focuses and is responsible about test best practices, but leads with a technical mindset too. A good manager’s door will always be open regardless of how busy he/she is. Also being sociable as a manager gives your org a friendly face and makes employees feel more secure. Do not forget to empathize and be a compassionate lead as this helps the team’s well-being too and in turn, there is respect and transparency. Finally, aim for a collaborative and holistic working approach as that would not only help your team grow but also serve as a great example.

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There are many metrics that drive the efficiency of an engineering team. These are easier to meet when your team is small but after the team crosses 50 engineers, it is reasonably hard to manage engineering productivity. Most engineering managers spend all their time ensuring that the team does not have bottlenecks. The north star for teams is usually some well defined metrics at this stage. We interviewed a group of 20 engineering managers from leading companies in Australia and India to find the ones that are really important to their success. These are the ones we found are most important to them.

Cycle Time

Cycle time is a universal engineering metric that determines how effective a team is. A group must spend a certain amount of time on a feature from start to finish. Usually this includes planning, development, and testing. The metrics measure how quickly the development team can deliver the feature but it may not necessarily be deployed to production. 

Faster cycle time is a goal for every development team. The ability to monitor cycle times allows engineering managers to identify potential bottlenecks in the delivery process. A lot of compromises are sometimes made to meet higher cycle time as agility is very important to every business today.

Deploy Frequency

You can determine how often your team can release code into production by calculating the deployment frequency. Note that cycle time does not include deployment time. Teams working on development aim to distribute smaller pieces of code more frequently and in smaller batches.

It allows deployments to be more manageable to test and release. It also improves your overall efficiency.

Rework Ratio

This appears to be the most important metric for many teams and happens to also be a big area of concern. The rework ratio indicates the amount of code that must be changed after the team delivers it to production. The rework can be a bug or feature enhancement. If you have a high rework percentage, it can reduce your overall efficiency. 

Meeting high deployment frequency and cycle time can create an impact on the amount of testing done to push to production. This can lead to higher rework ratio as issues get raised by users later in the cycle. Any bug raised later leads to lost time in fixing old code which reduces the overall efficiency of the team. 

An insufficient level of communication or a flawed review process could lead to quality issues in the future.

Context Switching

As a result of various obstacles, team members must switch between issues in context. When the team switches context frequently, they are not working efficiently. To maintain focus, the appropriate adjustments should be made in this case. A huge reason for context switching is the process around fixing bugs in the development process. Sometimes the development process makes development teams use tools that make it hard to remain in the context of the development process. Most of the times, it is the testing cycle that leads to context switching due to the lack of adequate integrations across the development lifecycle. 

As you may have observed, there is one common thing that we found becomes an obstacle in achieving better engineering productivity metrics. The desire to drop cycle time and deploy frequently is usually done at a compromise of testing coverage. Eventually, it leads to more rework ratio and more context switching for the teams. Most teams that scaled their engineering process start by paying acute attention to the testing process. The idea is to automate what can be automated with tools that can allow developers to move faster.

Testing fast and at scale is the key to engineering efficiency. Spotify coined the term for this called “Quality at Speed”. To maintain Quality at Speed, a Quality Engineering counterforce is required. At Applitools, our customers have helped in achieving quality at ultrafast speed. Visual AI from Applitools provides you with the ability to extend human eyes on the testing process without having to increase the QA/Dev ratio in the team.  Some quotes from engineering managers that have used Applitools for building products include:

“Any engineering team can reduce the manual testing resource and time by at least 70%. It also avoids overloading of SDETs.”

Engineering Manager at Dunzo (India)

“At Pushpay, our success stems from a technology-forward culture which drives our behavior, how we solve problems, and what tools we use to solve them. Since partnering with Applitools over 5 years ago, we have been able to improve quality, gain productivity and thus save time and money. We could not be more pleased with the efficiency boost our team has experienced since adopting Applitools and more recently, the Ultrafast Grid.”

Engineering Manager at Pushpay (New Zealand)

Using visual AI to address these factors

If the above is something you wish to improve within your team, then you will be surprised that it takes just a few days to get to this degree of speed at quality. 

The picture below shows how Applitools integrates with your application.

I will not get into how to install Applitools, as that is fairly well described in the tutorials. This also includes how you can integrate Applitools within your CI/CD pipeline. In the remainder of this article, I will like to tell you about some great examples of improving these metrics using Applitools. 

Most efficient teams would start a day with the below dashboard. This gives you a comprehensive view of all your tests that have been executed across your entire coverage list. Having high coverage is made easy by using an ultrafast grid that reduces your rework ratio later for devices or browsers that may not have been included before. At last a number of re-work happens due to poor coverage of testing in the first phase of development. Of course there is an element of scope creep that leads to the re-work as well which can be easily avoided by involving cross-functional teams in the development process. Applitools provide a visual abstraction of your application that can be accessed by everyone on a GUI. This drastically brings down the areas of scope creep unless the requirements have totally changed by business.

When you are doing testing for high coverage it becomes important that you are not getting slowed down by the process of reviewing the bugs. A big reason why deployment frequency gets reduced is because of the time it takes to review and fix the issues. This is exactly where Visual AI plays a big role.

Visual AI also lets you troubleshoot the defects really quickly.

Finally, developers and testers can use the same platform which integrates seamlessly with Jira or their preferred communication channel for faster feedback. Email and Slack notifications help the team get the feedback fast without any context switching.

To conclude, the engineering manager needs to explore more deeply how engineering processes are structured as the engineering team grows. Businesses are demanding faster releases of standard quality products, and Visual AI is an effective method of improving both efficiency and coverage of testing.

Learn about more about visual AI with Applitools Eyes.

Check out the latest test automation videos from Applitools.

We hope you got to take time to rest, unplug, and spend time with your loved ones to finish out 2022 with gratitude. I have been incredibly appreciative of the learning opportunities and personal growth that 2022 offered. In reflection of our past quarter here at Applitools, we’ve curated our latest videos from some amazing speakers. If you missed any videos while away on holiday or finishing off tasks for the year, we’ve gathered the highlights for you in one spot.

ICYMI: Back in November, Andrew Knight (a.k.a. the Automation Panda) shared the top ten Test Automation University courses.

Cypress vs. Playwright: The Rematch

One of our most popular series is Let the Code Speak, where we compare testing frameworks in real examples. In our rematch of Let the Code Speak: Cypress vs. Playwright, Andrew Knight and Filip Hric dive deeper to how Cypress and Playwright work in practical projects. Quality Engineer Beth Marshall moderates this battle of testing frameworks while Andy and Filip explore comparisons of their respective testing frameworks in the areas of developer experience, finding selectors, reporting, and more.

Automating Testing in a Component Library

Visual testing components allows teams to find bugs earlier, across a variety of browsers and viewports, by testing reused components in isolation. Software Engineering Manager David Lindley and Senior Software Engineer Ben Hudson joined us last year to detail how Vodafone introduced Applitools into its workflow to automate visual component testing. They also share the challenges and improvements they saw when automating their component testing.

When to Shift Left, Move to Centre, and Go Right in Testing

Quality isn’t limited to the end of the development process, so testing should be kept in mind long before your app is built. Quality Advocate Millan Kaul offers actionable strategies and answers to questions about how to approach testing during different development phases and when you should or shouldn’t automate. Millan also shares real examples of how to do performance and security testing.

You, Me, and Accessibility: Empathy and Human-Centered Design Thinking

Inclusive design makes it easier for your customers with your varying needs and devices are able to use your product. Accessibility Advocate and Crema Test Engineer Erin Hess talks about the principles of accessible design, how empathy empowers teams and end users, and how to make accessibility more approachable to teams that are newer to it. This webinar is helpful all team members, whether you’re a designer, developer, tester, product owner, or customer advocate.

Erin also shared a recap along with the audience poll results in a follow-up blog post.

Future of Testing October 2022

Our October Future of Testing event was full of experts from SenseIT, Studylog, Meta, This Dot, EVERSANA, EVERFI, LAB Group, and our own speakers from Applitools. We covered test automation topics across ROI measurement, accessibility, testing at scale, and more. Andrew Knight, Director of Test Automation University, concludes the event with eight testing convictions inspired by Ukiyo-e Japanese woodblock prints. Check out the full Future of Testing October 2022 event library for all of the sessions.

Skills and Strategies for New Test Managers

Being a good Test Manager is about more than just choosing the right tools for your team. EasyJet Test Manager Laveena Ramchandani shares what she has learned in her experience on how to succeed in QA leadership. Some of Laveena’s strategies include how to create a culture that values feedback and communication. This webinar is great for anyone looking to become a Test Manager or for anyone who has newly started the role.

Ensuring a Reliable Digital Experience This Black Friday

With so much data and so many combinations of state, digital shopping experiences can be challenging to test. Senior Director of Product Marketing Dan Giordano talks about how to test your eCommerce application to prioritize coverage on the most important parts of your application. He also shares some common shopper personas to help you start putting together your own user scenarios. The live demo shows how AI-powered automated visual testing can help retail businesses in the areas of visual regression testing, accessibility testing, and multi-baseline testing for A/B experiments.

Dan gave a recap and went a little deeper into eCommerce testing in a follow-up blog post.

Cypress, Playwright, Selenium, or WebdriverIO? Let the Engineers Speak!

Our popular Let the Code Speak webinar series focused primarily on differences in syntax and features, but it doesn’t really cover how these frameworks hold up in the long term. In our new Let the Engineers Speak webinar, we spoke with a panel of engineers from Mercari US, YOOBIC, Hilton, Q2, and Domino’s about how they use Cypress, Playwright, Selenium, and WebdriverIO in their day-to-day operations. Andrew Knight moderated as our panelists discussed what challenges they faced and if they ever switched from one framework to another. The webinar gives a great view into the factors that go into deciding what tool is right for the project.

Read the Let the Engineers Speak recap blog series

Let the Engineers Speak! Part 5: Audience Q&A

Articles — 01.11.2023

Let the Engineers Speak! Part 4: Changing Frameworks

Articles — 01.05.2023

Let the Engineers Speak! Part 3: Favorite Test Integrations

Articles — 12.28.2022

Let the Engineers Speak! Part 2: The Biggest Challenges

Articles — 12.22.2022

More on the way in 2023!

We’ve got even more great test automation content coming this year. Be sure to visit our upcoming events page to see what we have lined up.

Check out our on-demand video library for all of our past videos. If you have any favorite videos from this list or from 2022, you can let us know @Applitools. Happy testing!