Sam Woods

3,609 reputation

217

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	location	Portland, OR
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visits	member for	1 year, 9 months
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I have been at Webtrends for over a year where I am overseeing the automation efforts. Prior to Webtrends I was at Microsoft for 13 years. Early challenges have included updating a full-featured, yet complex and poorly maintained in-house automation framework, building a common automation logging and reporting platform, creating a tool for simple Deployment Validations, creating automated Performance tests for multiple products, building an object oriented wrapper/abstraction layer for web UI automation on top of selenium and a couple of minor quick-fix tools to increase the speed of manual testing. I have also been involved in a hiring effort to bring our team of one (me) up to a team of 5.

During my time at Microsoft my responsibilities evolved from test planning and manual testing on various projects to --> writing automation and overseeing manual testing efforts from vendors to --> Developing automation tools and processes for the Windows Live organization including a web UI automation framework and a test result reporting platform as well as other smaller tools.

	3,609 reputation	bio	website		visits	member for	1 year, 9 months
217 badges		location	Portland, OR		seen	yesterday

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154 Comments

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1d	comment	Difference between requirement, use case, and scenario? Yep, and it may be useful to come up with a common, agreed upon, published definition somewhere so that when you're talking amongst teammates you know that you're all on the same page.
2d	comment	Has anyone used Parasoft's SOATest Tool? Hi user5287. Can you expand this question? Do you really just want to know if anyone has used it, or are you looking for a tool that fulfills certain requirements and want to know if this fits the bill? Or are you interested in comparisons between this tool and other similar tools?
May 20	comment	Can we write wrapper class for TestNG and Junit framework What is the goal of this wrapper? What sort of scenario are you trying to enable with it vs directly calling TestNG? Worst case you could spawn a process to execute TestNG from command line.
May 17	comment	API Automated Testing Tool XML & JSON It looks like for java this json schema validator tool github.com/fge/json-schema-validator uses the same schema defined at json-schema.org
May 17	comment	API Automated Testing Tool XML & JSON Yes, json.net for example uses the json schema defined at json-schema.org. You can create json schema files and use the JsonValidatingDeserializer for all of the responses. Examples here: james.newtonking.com/archive/2009/01/04/…
May 13	comment	Problems with maintenance of Selenium on grid service Not really an answer to your question, but I've seen a lot of people having success with saucelabs.com rather than maintaining their own grid and the fees seem reasonable especially considering you now don't need to worry about hardware or maintenance for the grid.
May 6	comment	Recommendations for code coverage tools? Awesome, I'll definitely check this out when I get to the Java side!
May 3	comment	How to get the Event Object of the Click event on Selenium IDE? Is this the only area on the page, or are there multiple? Could it be finding the incorrect element? Also, does the click fail, or does it complete and appear to succeed from Selenium's point of view but doesn't do anything in your app?
May 2	comment	Selenium Webdriver \| Unable to locate element error Further up the tree, is that td inside of an iframe?
May 2	comment	Selenium Webdriver \| Unable to locate element error Are you sure there is an element with the name "Username"? Is the element in an iframe?
Apr 30	comment	Recommendations for code coverage tools? Can you expand your answer? How do mstest, nunit and junit resolve my needs for code coverage?
Apr 29	comment	Crowdfunded feature request system - would it make users hate me? A possible alternative would be to open source it, and if people want specific features, they can contribute those features, or anyone who is interested could come in and pick a requested feature to implement. If your goal is to monetize and make a little money, this may not be the best answer for you.
Apr 16	comment	Automated Test Management: Running, Saving Results, Querying, etc At my company we have also created custom solutions for much of this. I would love to see a response from someone with some tools that have "everything" you would need, but I don't know of any. It seems like a pretty big gap in the industry if you ask me.
Apr 3	comment	how to test mobile application which uses wifi connection? Do you really want to randomize the signal, or do you want to completely control it, with the ability to vary the signal strength? Randomizing the signal does not seem like the best approach for testing purposes, while varying the signal could be useful.
Mar 21	comment	Automate functional testing for WCF services I haven't used the form based input from SoapUI pro (I have only used the free version) but it seems like for manual testing purposes you can use tools such as Fiddler, or browser plug-ins such as Postman.
Mar 7	comment	Load Testing Ajax application That's true, especially if there is authentication, what will be recorded and played back by default is a session cookie, which will change with each log in, so you would need to execute the login request, extract the session cookie info and replace the session cookie in all future requests with that one, but that's a whole different question :-)
Mar 5	comment	Selenium IDE newbie - click on button not working .net Thanks Caroline, if you find an answer helpful please remember to upvote it as well. If an answer completely answers your question, you can mark it as accepted so that anyone else with the same question in the future will be able to easily find the correct answer.
Feb 25	comment	Selenium IDE newbie - click on button not working .net When you said "doesn't work" do you mean nothing happens, or an exception occurs? It could be an issue of an incorrect css identifier, but we don't have the button html to see if that is the case. Can you include the page's html, or the relevant part of it? We could then create css, xpath or alternative identifiers for you that would work.
Feb 19	comment	SQL “sandbox” for new QA staff training: DB structure, approach, deployment and maintenance? As for SQL vs Oracle, the concepts are going to be pretty much identical, however there are a number of differences in the syntax and built in functions: dba-oracle.com/oracle_news/…
Feb 11	comment	Parse .htaccess credentials in Internet Explorer You may want to include information about what sort of tests you are running, what tool you are using to execute them, etc.