Dave Haeffner has had a varied career that began with a degree in networking engineering. He worked various roles in IT operations, eventually stumbling into QA and test automation without a background in programming. This started him on a path that ultimately lead him to author ‘The Selenium Guidebook‘. Along the way, he’s helped various companies implement automated acceptance testing (The Motley Fool, ManTech International, Sittercity, and Animoto), spoken at numerous conferences and meetups around the world about how to use Selenium successfully, and is an active contributor to the open source Selenium project.

In June 2018 he moved to Tel Aviv from the US to join Applitools as the second member of our open-source Selenium IDE team, working closely with Tomer Steinfeld. We sat down with Dave to talk us through his career path and the work he currently does to improve Selenium IDE.

Hi Dave! Thank for joining us! To begin with, could you tell us a little about your background and how you ended up becoming a Selenium expert?

I actually went to college for network engineering at a small state school in upstate New York, which is a business school. I chose this program because, at the time, I was really into computer networking and gaming. When I discovered that there was a degree that meant I could do the things I love for a living I was sold!

After qualifying, I began working as a network engineer in a state hospital. It was a very specific role. I quickly realized I needed more opportunities for career growth. With this in mind, I moved to DC to work as a support engineer for a boutique consulting firm. Eventually, I got burnt out on the work and became intrigued by the startup culture that was beginning to flourish in the tech industry.

A friend of mine worked at The Motley Fool. The concept of a flat organizational structure, working with great people and learning more about software testing drew me in. I joined The Motley Fool as part of their desktop support team and used this platform to learn more about their software development team. After a couple of years in that position, there was an opportunity to transition into a role in QA. I wasn’t really sure what that entailed, but I was up for a new challenge.

How Was Your Transition to QA?

As it turns out, test automation was a hard thing in 2009. My new team had invested quite a lot of effort into test scripts with Selenium IDE and were having loads of issues with maintaining them. Like me, none of my teammates had a background in programming. This is really where my software testing story began.

I was fortunate to be in complete ignorance of how much I didn’t know. I dug in and started to look for ways to make the Selenium IDE scripts more maintainable and reliable. The wisdom of the crowd suggested that you needed to export your tests to a programming language and mold this code into something reasonable (e.g., a test harness). Unsure if we were on the right track, we gave it a shot. It seemed to help, but it was difficult as we were all fairly new to programming. That same year I had the opportunity to attend the annual Agile conference. While there, I got to meet the creator of Selenium, Jason Huggins. I told him about our trials and tribulations with Selenium IDE and code export. He said ‘It’s really hard, but you’re on the right track, kid.”

Filled with props from Selenium’s creator, I returned from the conference eager to keep going. Along with the help of some of my developer colleagues, we were able to make significant improvements in our automated testing practice. The following year, I returned to Agile as a speaker to share our story and lessons learned. As a result, Selenium became such a big part of my life that it afforded me the opportunity to branch out on my own and move into the world of consulting.

What was it like branching out on your own into consulting?

I’d always wanted to be an entrepreneur and the consulting thing naturally grew from my interest in Selenium. Working with a group of customers I gained insight into the limitations that teams encountered when trying to adopt practices using Selenium and how difficult it can be for teams to use test automation. I quickly realized that a lot of the problems around the tooling were the same – the same impediments, the same questions, even in the same order. It was like a Power Law! So I began writing them down and decided to organize a local Meetup to connect and learn from other practitioners.

I kept getting a lot of the same questions over email about Selenium and realized that it would be a lot easier to answer the question once, publish the solution online, and refer people to it. This is how I started my weekly Selenium tip newsletter (Elemental Selenium). Eventually, my work with Selenium started to become a known quantity, and my book (The Selenium Guidebook) evolved from this.

What convinced you to move your family to Tel Aviv and work for Applitools?

Back when I was applying for college, I had the opportunity to look at computer science. At that point, after being homeschooled I wasn’t confident in my math abilities, which put me off applying. I guess, I always wondered what it would be like. So, while I was consulting I tried to fill that void through self-teaching – starting with some of the fundamental programming books (e.g., The Gang of Four book, Working Effectively with Legacy Code, and Refactoring) and applying them to projects as I went along.

To be honest, I was hesitant to work with a company. After being self-employed for the better part of a decade I thought it would be a tough transition. Also, I wasn’t sure if a company would be open to hiring someone who is an expert in one area but mediocre in others. But Adam Carmi (CTO at Applitools) saw an opportunity for my expertise that would also allow me to work on my software development skills. Applitools is making an impressive investment in the IDE, with two people to working full-time on its development (me & Tomer Steinfeld). It was a unique and rare opportunity that I couldn’t pass up. Plus, I’d always wanted to live in another country.

Right now, I’m working with Doron Zavelevsky and Tomer Steinfeld. Their depth of knowledge is impressive, as is their willingness for knowledge sharing. As I work on Selenium IDE, I often reflect back to my early days with the tool and think — I’ve come full circle.

Sounds like it’s working out to be a great match! Could you tell us a little about your role?

Working in open source is great, but it’s not without challenges. We have a lot of constraints, both technical limitations and a large backlog of development and feature requests. Selenium IDE is built as a web extension which also presents some unique challenges. As does writing record and playback functionality in the browser (hello edge cases!). But it’s a lot of fun, and we learn something new every day.

You Must Have A Lot On Your Plate!

Absolutely, but that’s what makes it interesting. Selenium IDE has a history of neglect. It’s been good enough for some, but terrible for others. The amount of interest to push the tool forward often peters out. Here, it’s our job to make it into a robust tool that helps people with end-to-end testing in the browser. We’re working to make the tool more reliable, more powerful, and more intuitive. Ultimately my goal in this role is to remove the stigma attached to Selenium IDE and record-and-playback. I continue to learn good software development practices along the way (and also improve my Hebrew!).

What Else Do You Want Readers to Know About Applitools?

Our engineering team is hiring! Take a look at our job openings and get in contact to find out more: www.applitools.com/careers

The post Why I joined Applitools: Dave Haeffner appeared first on Automated Visual Testing | Applitools.

Ram Nathaniel joined Applitools in 2017, with a mission to make visual AI and visual testing accessible to all frontend developers and functional testers across all web platforms and devices. To do this, he set about building a team of innovative algorithm developers. They apply computer vision and deep learning techniques to complex and challenging algorithmic problems. Armed with over 20 years experience, Ram is growing his Algorithms team at Applitools, and is dedicated to hiring the most creative and passionate people in the industry.

Ram sat down with us to explain his work and his team.

Hi Ram, thanks for joining us! You’re currently expanding your Computer Vision Algorithms team – could you tell us about the impact algorithm developers have at Applitools?

My team develops the core computer-vision technology of the company.

We developed a computer system to emulate the human eye and brain, look at millions of images of application screens, and use AI-powered computer vision technology to compare them. Our algorithms only report UI differences that are significant and perceptible to the human eye. This unique problem challenges our team.

We want to offer a simple solution to a time-consuming problem that application developers and software testing professionals must overcome every day: look at user interfaces and make sure it is visually correct, and remains visually perfect across a wide matrix of devices, screen sizes, browsers, and operating systems, dynamic content, localized languages, font sizes, and more. Most engineers find this to be laborious and time-consuming work. Even experienced engineers make mistakes in visual validation. My team believes a computer should do this work. We develop sophisticated computer vision algorithms that automate visual validation and allow this task to be performed automatically much faster, and in a much more accurate manner than a human can do.

Think about the number of screens you read your daily news update on. For each device, the same news page is presented in a slightly different display – smaller screens, different pixels, different OS, etc. Our human eye processes these changes without us paying too much notice – that is, until something goes wrong (check out #guigonewrong for some examples!). Our brain figures this out pretty quickly because we encounter challenging images all the time. A computer, on the other hand, needs to be taught what’s visually right or wrong. My team teaches the computer to observe user interfaces, thoroughly understand it, and make sure it is correct and of good quality. Thus eradicating this tiresome job for frontend developers and app testers.

I see automated visual regression testing becoming a must-have tool for anyone writing code. It makes life and work for UI developers more efficient and productive, while also removing the risk of human error. As we progress with our work, I truly believe we are approaching a time when no user interface will be created, without the assistance of visual test automation to visually validate its correctness.

Could you explain some of the challenges that you encounter and how you go about overcoming them?

Applitools’ unique technology enables validating that the structure is still the same, despite the content having changed. This means that the algorithms need to thoroughly understand what they process about each image, in order to separate the dynamic data from the structure.

We must build a computer vision system, introduce these images to the system, train it to recognize each tiny nuance, and validate correctness. This means creating highly accurate algorithms. Our customers trust us with the quality of our product. We strive to deliver more than just high detection rates. We aim for perfection within our tool and the algorithms that support this. It’s not an easy task, but we’re getting closer to achieving it every day.

We must contend with an added layer of complexity – dynamic technology for designing web applications. While we constantly push the envelope of technology to advance our tool, the world of web and mobile app design keeps pushing the envelope of creativity by introducing new and more challenging user interfaces. Software development teams and customers appreciate the innovations, but those innovations present a huge challenge for our team. We must keep up with these changes and help our product navigate and evolve around each new piece of the puzzle.

Because our team drives core product behavior, any behavioral change impacts our customer base, which is growing every day. An algorithmic change that my team makes affects hundreds of customers that run millions of comparisons each week. This central role requires us to focus on perfection and quality-control when we set our deliverables.

We work hard to overcome these challenges. Our role leads to a perfect an artificial sense of sight that fully understands what we present to it. It takes constant work, discovery and reiterations to the process, but my team is up for the challenge!

What are the key traits that your team demonstrate to cope with these challenges?

I have participated in quite a few computer vision projects over the years. Most improved on a well-defined task. Here, we are inventing completely new technology. In my experience, inventive teams require highly skilled, confident, diverse and collaborative members! We seek a very particular skill set, centered around creativity, coupled with a proven track record of persistence and drive.

The people we hire are passionate about what they are doing and are innovators by character. At Applitools, we produce complex vision algorithms that propel computer vision systems in new directions. This means that each person takes ownership of what they do and recognize how it contributes to our overall mission.

My team takes pride in their work and they are fearless when it comes to experimenting with new technologies. In turn, this persistence and creativity motivates others to innovate and collaborate within their roles. This type of creativity revolutionizes an industry and paves the way for Applitools to create the world’s first automated visual UI testing platform.

We solve a dynamic problem that evolves constantly. This is what makes it exciting! We are at the forefront of our field, and when people join us they need to demonstrate this passion and drive. I don’t expect them to know everything on day one. We take the time to teach new joiners the new techniques we have been developing. After this, it is down to their hunger to learn and their ambition to have an impact within the industry. In order to be a developer at the cutting edge of new technology, it takes a bit of a “hutzpa” – to dare and aspire, in order to change the world!

Great! As your team continues to grow, what aspirations do you have for computer vision algorithms at Applitools?

I believe ambitious aspirations are what motivate a team to achieve more with their work. A while ago, we all sat down together and completed an exercise called ‘our future selves’ in which we envisioned where we would be a year from now.

When I look to the future of UI development, I see app developers designing with Applitools products. The Applitools product family provides developers with accurate information, telling them if their graphical language works, if their user experience flows, if they have a valid implementation, across all target screens and devices, and if visually impaired people can still use their software… There is also a lot of scope for us to expand the coverage of the tool so that it can be applied within virtual and augmented reality. One day, I can see Applitools providing a vital tool for all 3D games too.

My team of algorithm developers is at the heart of the visual automation testing revolution. I aspire that their work will continue to blur the line between what is considered work for a human, and work for a computer. Our AI solutions will shape the future of software development and improve the way people interact with software every day. We will continue to push the industry in new directions and fuel the rapid growth of Applitools.

At the inception of Applitools, the founders heard time and again from engineers and investors that the company would find it impossible to build this tool. I am proud to say that my team’s work proves those skeptics wrong. Our vision, working on the cutting edge of this new technology, enables this impossible idea to become a reality.

The post Ram Nathaniel: Pushing the boundaries of Computer Vision appeared first on Automated Visual Testing | Applitools.

We sat down to speak to Yarden Naveh, Director of Customer Success at Applitools. Yarden’s career path has combined his passion for innovative technology with his desire to make these technologies accessible to wider audiences.  In this interview, Yarden talks about how a Customer Success role at Applitools links products and people with successful outcomes. He describes how, in his role, he enjoys working with a multitude of people every day.  Through his work in Customer Success, Yarden continues to develop and apply his engineering and people skills across a varied and challenging array of technical projects.

Yarden is currently hiring for several positions within his team in the US and Israel. If you want to learn more about these, check out our jobs page.

Hi Yarden, it’s great to have you here! So, tell us what convinced you that a career in Customer Success would be a good fit?

Ever since I was very young I’ve always been interested in technology.

I started off my career as a software engineer. I enjoyed the technical challenges that the role brought with it. In that role, one is constantly presented with a new set of problems. One must challenge him or herself to come up with appropriate solutions with each project. Although technology is something that I’ve always enjoyed, I truly enjoyed and got energy from the people interactions. When it came to my project choices, I naturally gravitated towards the people facing projects. That’s my main motivation for going for a career in Customer Success. It allowed me to combine both skill sets.

Also, on a more personal note, my real understanding of how organizations work and the importance of efficient optimized processes came from back home: having two amazing parents, who have been very successful business people as a role model my entire life. The combination of business-oriented thinking, technical aptitude and the passion to work with and help people, also lead me to pursue this path for my career.

Could you tell us about what a day in your life in Customer Success at Applitools?

As Customer Success Engineers at Applitols, our customers are our priority. We interact with a range of people coming from very different types of organizations every day: from small businesses to large enterprises. This range presents us with a bunch of different problems to assess and resolve. Our best people demonstrate a great dexterity with context switching, constantly diving into a completely different set of problems.

Our customers’ success often hinges on integrating Applitools Eyes with incumbent third-party technologies. Each customer’s deployment is unique; it can involve different programming languages and technology stacks, operating systems, devices, integrations with open source and vendor frameworks, various CI and source control systems, etc. This can get quite complex! But luckily, this also means that no two days are ever really the same.

The role also involves cross-collaboration with other teams in the business. As our product develops and grows, it’s important for me and my team to be on top of the changes so that we can help our clients to get the best out of our services. This is why we work very closely and collaborate with the Engineering and Product teams, liaising between the two, while advocating for the needs of the customers that we manage.

Could you tell us about Customer Success at Applitools and how you define your mission?

My team goes on a journey with each customer and supports them through the process from demos to onboarding, through to training and development of best practices. As Customer Success, it is our mission to enable our customers to utilize Applitools technology to its full potential.

We currently have 12 people looking after Customer Success at Applitools: five are based in Israel and seven in the US. And, we are growing! We have several Software Support Engineer roles open in both Israel and across the US.

Our customer base is increasing much faster each quarter, so basically, we need more hands on deck.  With a bigger team, we have aspirations to add more touchpoints to the customer journey and improve and scale the onboarding experience and in doing so, increase our customer number.

For people who are contemplating a career in Customer Success at Applitools, what qualities do you look for in a hire?

In this global team, you need to show that you align with our two main values. Firstly, you have got to be a people person with a customer focus! These are challenging roles that require people with savvy interpersonal skills – so you have to have a passion for understanding and supporting customer requests! We’re service-oriented and to excel you need to personally care enough about the customer and the value that you can help them achieve with the product. Secondly, you’ve got to be a team player. We work as a family and we look for people to fit into this process seamlessly and to synergize with everyone, collaborating with many other groups within the company to ensure that we advocate for our customers’ needs.

Beyond our team and people values, you need to demonstrate that you are technically adept. These roles offer the opportunity to those with the technical aptitude to broaden their abilities and apply these new skills at an exceptionally fast rate. Each day you’ll encounter new technical problems and will be challenged to create workable and manageable solutions for your customers.

These roles challenge our team to learn more about new technologies. We currently work a lot exciting and evolving automation frameworks like Selenium IDE, WebdriverIO & Cypress. In fact, many of our customers depend on our experience to help them increase their test automation effectiveness. We start by helping them deploy visual UI testing with Appitools Eyes; we end helping them become more efficient as a team. A lot of our team have deep experience in multiple programming languages and technologies, which they combine with their love of analytics and problem solving to offer our customers the best solutions.

In 12 months time, what do you hope to have achieved with your Customer Success team at Applitools?

I want to find some more great people to build out the team. I seek people with both technical and soft skills, as well as the cultural fit. We don’t compromise on these requirements because we want to learn and progress with each other while prioritizing our customers.

Our goal is to broaden our customer reach and demonstrate the value of our product in more meaningful ways. Our work directly translates to increased use of Applitools Eyes and the value our customers are getting out of it. We know that customer results drive our renewal business. We are metric-oriented and over the next 12 months, we intend to push our renewal numbers even higher.

With future releases in the pipeline, I know that Applitools has a lot to offer to all our customers. Our team is on a mission to help our customers get the most from their Applitools product. We want our customers’ integration and use experience to be as seamless and smooth as possible.

Has this article got you contemplating joining our team at Applitools?

Check out our open roles for information on how to apply!

Find out more about Applitools. Setup a live demo with us, or if you’re the do-it-yourself type, sign up for a free Applitools account and follow one of our tutorials.

Applitools develops powerful technology for visual testing. Here are some other posts that might interest you:

How I ran 100 UI tests in just 20 seconds

What Is Front End Testing in 2019?

Applitools Expands Left: AI Powered Ultrafast Visual Testing for Developers

The post Yarden Naveh: Linking product and people with successful outcomes appeared first on Automated Visual Testing | Applitools.

Tomer Steinfeld has been working as a Frontend Developer with Applitools for over a year now. He’s an expert developer and the nicest of people! His current focus has been rewriting Selenium IDE from scratch to bring it up to date with modern web standards. It is now both a Google Chrome extension and Firefox add-on, is written in React and MobX and does very challenging things. These include recording user interactions, playing them back, supporting many types of UI selectors, supporting interaction with other extensions to extend functionality, emitting code and exporting it, dealing with security constraints, and much more.

We sat down with Tomer to find out what brought him to work in web development and Applitools, and how he continues to learn and build on his skills within his role.

What is your current role?

I work in the test automation space, and because of my love for open source, I am in charge of Selenium IDE, an open source, record-playback tool based on Selenium. It’s an extension that allows people who don’t know how to code to automate web interactions.

Can you tell us about your background?

I started writing code around 4th grade, specifically JavaScript, because I was really curious about how the web worked. Then around the time I was in High School I really got into iOS development, got a Mac and everything, and invested a lot of time teaching myself, still couldn’t understand the block syntax. When I was 17, Apple offered me a scholarship to go to WWDC and I missed my finals in Physics to attend it! (I still had to pay for the flight though…)

After that, I published a few apps to the App Store (check them out here), I got enlisted, and was placed within the computing division of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). For the first time in my life, I was writing code professionally, rather than for myself, which meant I had to be a team player. Particularly important was how to implement workflows and how to make sure the code I was writing was readable and understandable by my teammates. This proved to be an advantage when I was released from the service and started to look for a job in the tech industry.

Since there was no iOS development in the army, I naturally got back into web development by default. However, going back to the web gave me the opportunity to learn about React and the technologies I rely on today at Applitools.

What motivated you to apply to Applitools?

Looking for your first job is a pretty difficult process because even if you’re good, and you have no problem finding a job, the first one had to be one that would challenge you and make you improve as a developer. Starting on the wrong foot can really be detrimental to your career, so I was careful in selecting the companies I approached and assessing any red-flags.

During my time at the IDF, I learned the value of having a good manager. Within my unit, I had a manager who I felt I could really learn from and that was a great change for me. He pushed me to learn and achieve more, and he challenged the limits of my knowledge.

During my job search, a friend who knows Doron Zavelevsky recommended that I talk to him because he thought working with him could be a similar experience. Doron is known in React circles and from other open-source projects and all that sparked my interest. I wanted to find someone I could learn from, run ideas against and have a good second opinion. After meeting him, I felt working at Applitools and having Doron as a manager was good insurance to progressing my career and challenging and improving my skill set.

What surprised you most about Applitools?

After joining Applitools, I was surprised to find out how much it is known in the test automation industry, particularly for such a small company. This is largely due to that fact that we hire top talent. Each person has a very defined role and skillset and a well-defined problem area to work on. Working here every day, it’s easy to get used to this, but because of the Applitools people and their unique specialized skillsets, we are able to maintain relationships with industry leaders and have people look forward to what Applitools has to offer.

Could you tell me about your Selenium IDE project?

Selenium IDE is an open-source test automation tool, designed to record website interactions and then play them back. It is developed with the Selenium community, which has its own challenges outside writing code, managing the community, coordinating work with other contributors and more.

I was interested because it was open-source, a new project, and I could do it the way I wanted and using the tools I wanted to use to build it. It’s fun! Initially, we thought this project would just be part of my role. At the beginning there was a lot of pressure to get something working and be able to say that we were doing this properly, we thought things might slow down after. But instead the project has continued to grow and we’ve hired Dave Haeffner to share the load!

What can we find you doing outside of work?

Recently, I’ve been working on a new personal blog, I’m using GatsbyJS both because it’s React based, and I like React, but also because it generates a static website at the end of it. Hosting a static website is free nowadays (even with SSL), so I don’t have to pay a dime for it. You can check it out here.

What’s next for you at Applitools?

I’m not ready to make a big move just yet within Applitools, because I feel that my Selenium IDE project isn’t mature enough to stop working on it full-time, but once it gets to that point, I really want to get into more diverse projects and work with more people within R&D. This would open up seeing R&D from other people’s points of view. There are plenty of opportunities to challenge me further here – it’s just a case of deciding where to focus.

Interested in hearing more about opportunities to progress your career with Applitools? Check out our careers page or contact one of us to hear more!

The post Tomer Steinfeld: Why I joined Applitools appeared first on Automated Visual Testing | Applitools.