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groovyguy's avatar
groovyguy
Champion Level 1
6 years ago

Testing procedures and training

Looking to start another thread of what I hope turns into a good discussion. What are your usual testing procedures and what are some of your training steps when you have a new hire? What are some of your go-to resources when spinning up someone new to your testing team?

 

Currently, I'm having a new member of my team walk through the tests for one of our established services to learn it and see the end-goal of our testing procedure and I want to work backwards from there. Looking forward to any and all input!

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  • richie's avatar
    richie
    Community Hero
    6 years ago

    Hey!

     

    Thought I'd give my opinion on this as I've recently got someone new in - I can't say my attempt worked though - I had to let him go! Hopefully the next person will be better! :)

     

    It does depend if they are permanent or contractors, whether they have SoapUI experience or they dont and how technical they are.

     

    I ask them to read a list of things (I've prepared documents with the following subjects):


    SOAP
    REST
    SOAP vs REST
    ESB (different components and reasons for ESB - redundancy/message/field/value transformation etc.)
    Message Exchange Patterns
    Asynch messaging
    Synch Messaging
    Reasons for Synch/Asynch messaging
    Impact of Sync/Asynch messaging using tools like SoapUI (requirements of Dev to sometimes develop additional APIs to support the testing for asynch (no responses) or synch (when synch responses dont provide what we need - e.g. supporting property transfer etc.)
    Wellformed XML/JSON
    Valid XML/JSON
    .wsdl, .wadl
    Swagger/OpenAPI
    Optimistic vs pessimistic locking
    Significance of >=3 tiered web apps, relative to 2 tiered client/server apps
    SQL - scalar and aggregate functions, nested queries, significance of inner and outer joins etc.

     

    I then get them to then read certain sections of 'Web Services Testing With SoapUI'.

     

    After this - I introduce them to SoapUI - the UI can look a little 'busy' if you're not used to it - so that takes some time.

     

    I then describe a projects high level architecture (system A, ESB, System B etc.) then introduce them to a fairly straightforward SoapUI project that spans a variety of test step types (using data sources, REST and SOAP requests, and simple property transfers, JDBC requests) and I provide a spreadsheet of high level tests that low level SoapUI test cases map to just so they can visualise what the SoapUI tests actually exercise.

     

    HOWEVER - and this is what didn't work for the previous person I took on. He wasn't interested enough in the subject matter to put effort into reading the above list - you need to be interested in the subject for my approach to work.

     

    Also - I'm sure everyone's aware - there's nothing like actually 'doing the job' rather than reading about it - before it makes a difference.

     

    So in summary - if anyone's considering getting new team member - don't follow my approach - it didn't work! :)

     

    Cheers,

     

    richie