As testers we often have to rely on non-existing tools, commercial tools, or tools that no longer fit our need at this point in time.
Even though testing is a highly intellectual pursuit, it still involves a lot of manual steps, laborious work, and tasks to perform. A lot of which we can automate away. And I’m not strictly speaking of, or limiting myself to, test automation here. How many times have you had to unnecessarily download a bunch of files from a remote test server after running your tests, or download them via a browser, clicking on the links to the files and saving them?
Or had to parse through line after line of log files, trying to find a specific string of words, and count how many times it occurred in the file?
Or for that matter, had to write that same text for the test report over and over again, changing just a few words indicating the status, the date, and how many of something you encountered?
Or creating new, unique, test data before your test sessions, something we never have time to do manually it feels like.
In this live coding session I will show you short, powerful, and useful examples of small test tools, that address specific day-to-day tasks, of the same kind as the ones described above. And I’ll do it in Python where I’ll hopefully inspire you to continue learning the language as an added tool to your tester tool belt. I’ll start from the very basics, explaining as I go along, crafting more complex examples, building on the previous ones. All while explaining the language and what we are doing.
At the end of the day you will have seen several examples of how you can use Python when crafting your own test tools.
In turn, I promise one of the most fun sessions you’ll have attended in a while, given with a touch of mirth and a smile, and at the end of the day I hope to have inspired you into learning Python yourself.
