Next week I will be giving a talk at the Sydney Agile Meetup entitled "Automated Functional Testing - The good, the bad and the ugly". Here is the summary:

In the pursuit of continuous delivery, here is our reality:

Unit testing is good, but just not enough.

Every Project dedicate a big Functional Testing part at the end to deliver only the top of the testing pyramid.

Then the questions are:

• How can you deliver quickly if you need to retest your entire application manually for each release?
• What automation tools can you use to ensure that your automated tests do not become a maintenance nightmare?
• How can you write automated tests that testers can leverage to make their own manual testing more effective?

The Agile Sydney Community is proud to receive John Ferguson Smart.

Come and join us to challenge John on giving a live demonstration of automated acceptance criteria using JBehave, Selenium 2 and Thucydides.

This will give us the opportunity to discuss a number of open source and commercial automated testing tools, with many examples and stories from real-world projects.

John will talk about a range of tools and approaches to automated functional testing, and discuss the place of functional testing in a modern agile project.

He will look at topics such as:

• Where does testing fit into an agile development life-cycle
• Why it's too late to start testing at the end of the project or iteration
• What tests should you automate, and how
• What tools work best for different types of tests.

About John:

John Ferguson Smart is an internationally renown specialist in the domain of Behaviour Driven Development, Test Automation and Agile Technical Practices who has trained teams and run workshops all around the world, from the UK and Europe to North America, and from Hong Kong to Australia and New Zealand.

He is a well-known speaker at many international conferences and events, and is the author of several popular technical books including "BDD in Action", by Manning, and“Java Power Tools” and “Jenkins: The Definitive Guide”, both published by O'Reilly.

John is also the founder and lead developer of the Thucydides project, a new open source library that helps teams organise and implement more effective automated acceptance tests.