Workshops at SauceCon Online 2021

API Testing & Monitoring

4 hours | Basic + Advanced

In this 2-part workshop, learn how to create and deploy an API-based web app, how to build a scalable API test framework, and how to transition to a hybrid UI/API testing strategy that will support proper shift-right testing and monitoring of business-critical APIs.
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API Testing & Monitoring (4 hours | Basic + Advanced)

In this 2-part workshop, learn how to create and deploy an API-based web app, how to build a scalable API test framework, and how to transition to a hybrid UI/API testing strategy that will support proper shift-right testing and monitoring of business-critical APIs.

Build an API and an API Testing Framework From Scratch in 120 Minutes

Curious about how a REST API is created? Or curious about you might write automation to test it? In this workshop, we will go from a blank file to working REST API with a scalable automated test framework in 120 minutes! The API and test framework will be written using Python, a popular back-end language for many web applications.

Learning Outcomes

  • Learn how to create and deploy an API-based web app using Flask in Python
  • Understand some basic principles of creating a REST API
  • Understand the benefits of using requests, an excellent Python library for web requests
  • Learn how to build a scalable API test framework using Python and requests

Prerequisites

  • Knowledge of web development frameworks and APIs
  • Knowledge of Python
  • Use of test automation tools like Pytest is recommended but not required

Workshop Leader
Josh Grant
Senior Solutions Architect, Sauce Labs

Workshop Assistant
Evelyn Coleman
Solution Architect, Sauce Labs

Improving SLA Performance: QAs Should Own API Monitoring (2 hours | Basic)

Too often, when a business-critical app or web service goes down or fails to function correctly, it is difficult to pinpoint the source of the problem. One reason for this is that Developers, QA, and monitoring teams may be working in silos, and lack visibility across the entire org.

In this workshop, hear Patrick Poulin, VP of API Testing at Sauce Labs, discuss how leaders are transforming the SLA performance of API programs by making a simple but vital change in operations: unify QA teams while empowering them to own uptime monitoring. After all, QAs are best equipped to reuse functional tests written with high domain knowledge as monitors that can run with much higher integrity and reliability in production and live environments.

To help you get started, the workshop will break down how to transition to a hybrid UI/API testing strategy that will support proper shift-right testing and monitoring of business-critical APIs.

Outline

  • The Fast Track to Functional Uptime Monitoring: Meet Patrick Poulin of Sauce Labs and hear how much API testing and monitoring have improved and will continue to improve in the race for quality at speed.
  • New Rules for Quality (presentation): See why human error is behind 95% of errors that manage to go undetected until production, or worse, until a customer or cybercriminal discovers the live error.
  • Dangerous Bugs that UI Testing Alone Could Not Diagnose (presentation): Hear real examples of how hybrid UI/API testing expands coverage. Also learn how proper API monitoring can enhance API observability to help diagnose issues such as session or memory leaks.
  • Demo: Watch us convert an API functional test that was created in the prior workshop into a functional uptime monitor that is capable of going beyond uptime monitoring, and can check an entire API consumer flow without causing latency or bandwidth issues.
  • Checklist: Complete a Best Practices Checklist for API Functional Testing and Monitoring for QA/testers.
  • Q&A: 20-30 minutes of live questions regarding your checklist or our presentations.

Learning Outcome
Gain QA confidence to deploy modern API monitors that do a much better job of maintaining SLA performance. See results quickly: higher quality code in faster release cycles with shorter testing sprints.

Target Audience
Technical QA/testing leaders, non-technical QA/testing leaders, developers, and DevOps leaders are encouraged to attend.

Workshop Leader
Patrick Poulin
VP of API Testing, Sauce Labs

Workshop Assistant
Sangit Patel
Solution Engineer, Sauce Labs

Automation Best Practices

4 hours | Advanced

In this four-hour workshop, you will learn the most important and innovative automation best practices. You will take a bad suite of tests and use best practices to create a suite that can run cross-browser, in massive parallel, through a Continuous Integration pipeline on every commit.
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Automation Best Practices (4 hours | Advanced)

In this four-hour workshop, you will learn the most important and innovative automation best practices. You will take a bad suite of tests and use best practices to create a suite that can run cross-browser, in massive parallel, through a Continuous Integration pipeline on every commit. You will also learn how to shift-left as you learn how and when it’s appropriate to write lower level tests like API and unit. Furthermore, you will add visual and performance tests where appropriate. All of this is complete with lots of games and challenges and fun.

Outline

  • What makes a good automated test
  • How to create good page objects
  • How to create resilient tests
  • How to create automated atomic tests
  • How to correctly test login, links, tabs and much more
  • How to properly execute your test automation in massive parallel
  • How to integrate your automation into a CI pipeline
  • How to do automated visual testing
  • Front-end performance testing
  • Cloud-grid execution

Learning Outcome
By the end of this workshop you will have a deep understanding of how to test a web application by shifting-left and right. You will use multiple types of tests such as functional UI, API, visual, and performance to cover many testing gaps. You will also do this in a CI environment using industry best practices.

Target Audience
SDETs, Automation Engineers, or Developers looking to understand how to do full coverage test automation

Prerequisites

  • Knowledge of JavaScript
  • Your favorite IDE installed
  • Git installed

Workshop Leader
Nikolay Advolodkin
Senior Solutions Architect, Sauce Labs

Workshop Assistants
Enrique Gonzalez
Manager of Customer Support, Sauce Labs

Wim Selles
Senior Solution Architect, Sauce Labs

Crafting a Test Framework

4 hours | Advanced

As anyone who has maintained a large Selenium test suite knows, the largest costs are not in the creating or executing of the test suite but in maintaining it. There are straightforward ways to leverage your framework to minimize flakiness and make it easier to update test code only when needed.
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Crafting a Test Framework (4 hours | Advanced)

As anyone who has maintained a large Selenium test suite knows, the largest costs are not in the creating or executing of the test suite but in maintaining it. There are straightforward ways to leverage your framework to minimize flakiness and make it easier to update test code only when needed. We’ll walk through testing a sample real-world application focusing on how each of the components work together.

Workshop Leader
Titus Fortner
Senior Solutions Architect, Sauce Labs

Run Your Tests Anywhere

4 hours | Basic

Do you have a few JavaScript or Java tests and you need your colleague to run them for you? Oh, they don’t have Node or Java installed? What to do? Docker is the solution!
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Run Your Tests Anywhere (4 hours | Basic)

Do you have a few JavaScript or Java tests and you need your colleague to run them for you? Oh, they don’t have Node or Java installed? What to do? Docker is the solution!

Run your tests on your laptop, on your colleague’s laptop, run them on a local or a remote Continuous Integration server (CI). Combine Docker with your tests to avoid the dependency hell and enable anyone, anywhere to run them. Docker is commonly seen as a tool to package and deploy applications to different environments, but it is very useful in testing frontend and backend applications.

Putting your tests inside a Docker image can be daunting at the beginning, but a basic understanding of how Docker works, how to create Docker images and run Docker containers will enable us to run our tests anywhere.

This workshop will show you great foundations and concepts to run tests (and potentially any application) in Docker, which you will learn through practical exercises. We will go in detail through the process of putting a test suite in Docker, from creating the Docker image and running it locally to the point where we run our tests on a complete new CI. We will cover the common pitfalls when using Docker and best practices to build good Docker images and run stable Docker containers in different environments.

Outline

  • Introduction and quick environment check
  • Docker introduction
  • Introduction to our testing application (to be used along the workshop)
  • Putting the application in Docker and running it, as a practical exercise
  • Writing a few tests to test our sample application and using Docker to run them inside a container
  • Run multiple Docker containers via docker-compose to test our application in different environments
  • Running tests in a continuous integration pipeline
  • Wrap up

Learning Outcomes

  • Get insights on how an application can be containerized to make testing easier
  • Scale-up test suites by running them in parallel and in different environment combinations
  • Orchestrate multiple Docker containers to simplify test setup and execution
  • Integrate the different elements from the training to build test setups that fit better your web application testing needs
  • Identify and put together all the moving pieces of the test setup to facilitate the configuration of a continuous integration pipeline

Target Audience
Testers, developers, DevOps, and anyone interested in testing who wants to have a deeper understanding of Docker, and using it to enable running tests in any environment where Docker is installed.

Prerequisites

Workshop Leader
Diego Molina
Senior Software Engineer, Sauce Labs

Workshop Assistant
Eli Flores
Senior Software Engineer, Sauce Labs

The Nuts and Bolts of WebdriverIO

4 hours | Basic

While you can build a custom framework that fits your needs there are often already sophisticated setups or frameworks available that get you up and running very quickly.
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The Nuts and Bolts of WebdriverIO (4 hours | Basic)

While you can build a custom framework that fits your needs there are often already sophisticated setups or frameworks available that get you up and running very quickly.

WebdriverIO is one of these frameworks that is written in Node.js. It gets you up and running within minutes and allows you to scale up your test suite while maintaining your execution time by running tests in parallel. With its huge project community it is an ideal choice for small as well as big projects that use modern frameworks such as React, Angular or Vue.js.

In this workshop you will learn everything you need to know to run a successful, stable and maintainable WebdriverIO framework. It starts with an introduction to the project and the basic concepts and will end with a sophisticated framework that includes testing strategies like Frontend Performance Testing as well as complex browser interaction with Puppeteer.

Outline

  • Introduction
  • Setup Environment
  • Writing an automation script using Standalone Mode
  • WDIO Testrunner
  • Use of Reporter and Services
  • Page Objects
  • Performance Testing
  • Go Pro

Learning Outcome
This course will not only teach you the basic knowledge of browser automation but also provides a hand-on-experience that you can take back to your workplace and directly apply it to your projects.

Target Audience
Everyone is welcome to attend this workshop. The content provides material that helps beginner to get started as well as areas that guide professionals on complex browser interaction.

Prerequisites

  • Latest Node.JS installed (v.12 or higher)
  • Python installed (v2.7 or higher)
  • A browser needs to be available on the users operating system

Workshop Leader
Christian Bromann
Staff Software Engineer, Sauce Labs

Workshop Assistants
Enrique Gonzalez
Manager of Customer Support, Sauce Labs

Wim Selles
Senior Solution Architect, Sauce Labs

Run Cypress Tests on Sauce Labs Using Testrunner Toolkit

3 hours | Basic

Test Automation would be a lot easier without having to manage so many libraries, plugins, and tools to get your test environment working. Learn about how test TestRunner Toolkit makes it easy to utilize a Docker container or Sauce Labs Virtual Machines (VMs) for test environment setup, and get started writing Cypress tests in minutes.
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Run Cypress Tests on Sauce Labs Using Testrunner Toolkit (3 hours | Basic)

Test Automation would be a lot easier without having to manage so many libraries, plugins, and tools to get your test environment working. Learn about how test TestRunner Toolkit makes it easy to utilize a Docker container or Sauce Labs Virtual Machines (VMs) for test environment setup, and get started writing Cypress tests in minutes.

Learn the SauceCTL command line interface basics and install the toolkit, understand the structure of a TestRunner Toolkit Cypress project, and make a couple simple modifications to configuration files. Add some simple tests, and see what you can do with Cypress tests in the Sauce Labs dashboard. In under two hours you’ll be ready to run your tests locally and in a virtual environment, and be ready to writer a Cypress test suite taking advantage everything that using Cypress with Sauce Labs dashboard and insights offers.

By allowing the Sauce Labs TestRunner Toolkit to manage the complexities of your test environment, you can make a few simple modifications to your Sauce configuration file and access an up-to-date working environment with the ease of writing Cypress code and tests on a wide range of desktop browsers.

Learning Outcomes

  • Understand how to install and configure TestRunner Toolkit with Cypress
  • Understand the use case and advantages in creating Cypress Tests on Sauce Labs

Target Audience
Beginner to Intermediate automated testers with some experience with development environments

Prerequisites

  • The latest version of NodeJS
  • Working Knowledge of terminal commands necessary to navigate filesystems and modify programs
  • The latest version of Docker installed

Workshop Leader
Lindsay Walker
Technical E-Learning Developer, Sauce Labs

Workshop Assistants
Felix Pescarmona
Senior Software Engineer, Sauce Labs

James Tacker
Senior Technical Writer, Sauce Labs