Breakpoint 2020 is a 4-day virtual summit on everything testing. We're bringing speakers from the best dev and QA teams to talk about building QA processes, automating at scale and best practices for success with tools and frameworks.
Featured today is Benjamin Bischoff from trivago. After 15 years as a game/application developer and trainer, Benjamin decided to make test automation his career. He's currently a Test Automation Engineer in trivago's core QA team.
Benjamin is also the author and maintainer of two open source projects for Cucumber BDD parallel test execution and reporting. He is an occasional speaker at conferences on testing and automation.
Can you tell us about your role at trivago?
I'm a Test Automation Engineer in trivago's core QA team, which takes care of trivago's main user-facing applications. My tasks include developing and maintaining our in-house end-to-end test framework and test pipelines, logging and reporting test data. I am also the single point of contact for all test automation matters.
Can you give us a sneak-peek into your session for Breakpoint 2020?
I'm going to talk about the changes trivago went through, both technically and procedurally, on the journey towards a more efficient continuous delivery of our main product.
When we first started introducing test automation at a large scale, this almost failed, since there was not enough communication going on. I'm going to give an update on where we are now and where we want to go. It is going to be an up-to-date remix of my previous talks.
What do Cucable and Cluecumber help users do, and how did you come up with the idea?
Essentially, Cucable () is a Maven plugin that preprocesses Cucumber test scenarios so that they can be filtered and run in parallel.
It has many benefits, the main one being that you can significantly reduce the time spent running tests. This originated from a trivago hackathon in 2017. Since using Cucable, our former 45-minute test runs came down to 3 minutes.
Cluecumber is a Maven plugin that generates clean, easy-to-understand test reports from Cucumber JSON result files. I started this project during a trivago hackathon in 2018 because we were not satisfied with the existing reporting solutions.
Have you worked on any side-projects recently?
Yes, I started working on a completely new version of Cluecumber for the new Cucumber message protocol to eventually replace the JSON format. This will take some time, but I think it will be worth it.
I also finally launched my blog earlier this year and have some more topics up my sleeve!
What are you learning right now?
As a Java developer, I am learning about the ever-changing JVM ecosystem and what technologies can be used to make test automation more efficient. Apart from that, I am currently digging into the internals of the new Cucumber and Selenium releases.
Apart from technology, I generally read and learn a lot about close-up magic, which has been a passion of mine since childhood.
What would you tell someone new to testing?
Stay curious, don’t be afraid to ask questions and keep on learning!
