We recently had a chance to speak with senior engineering manager (applications) for Comcast Video Services, Clark Malmgren, about his role in test automation and how his experience and practices can lead to success in many areas of software testing.

Markus Gärtner is a tester and the author of ATDD by Example. In this interview with Zeger van Hese, Markus talks about his new book, the software craftsmanship movement, and “Beyond Testing,” a workshop he’ll be delivering later this year.

Testability is a key ingredient for building robust and sustainable systems. Neglecting testability during software development increases technical debt and has severe consequences on systems that are destined to operate for many years. Peter Zimmerer describes influencing factors and constraints of designing software for testability and shares his experiences on the value and benefits of testability-and the repercussions of poor testability. Using real-world projects as examples, Peter describes key factors in designing for testability-an architecture providing control and observation points, testing interfaces, built-in tests, logging and tracing, diagnosis facilities, and more. Take back a checklist of important issues, facts, and practices on designing for testability in your systems.

To keep up with ever-changing systems, most test automation developers spend countless hours updating, reworking, debugging, and validating test scripts. In an agile environment, keeping up is even more difficult. Bindu Laxminarayan explores powerful design patterns and coding practices she uses to maintain, extend, and reuse the test automation scripts. These design patterns will aid you in developing a robust automation framework and cut down the time you spend on routine maintenance tasks. Bindu describes and illustrates specific design patterns: Template Design Pattern, Test Object Pattern, Component Object Pattern, and Page Object Pattern. Take back code samples to help you understand the patterns in detail. By putting these patterns into practice, you'll improve test case development and make script debugging more efficient.