Test Automation

Experience in Action

During my time at PNC Bank, I experienced many different approaches to Automation Testing. My teams often worked in a mix of both Behavior Driven Development (BDD) and User Story Driven Development (USDD), while also adapting some aspects of Test Driven Development (TDD) when we had a clear projection of expected functionality.

Working closely with my teams' Business Analyst(s), I was able to closely translate the User Acceptance Criteria outlined by various Product Owners into thorough and effective Test Cases in our Selenium based Testing Framework. Leveraging Cucumber and the Gherkin language my teams were also able to write clear Feature files that could be quickly interpreted by less technical team members while still leveraging much of the power and flexibility of Selenium Automation. This, along with the adoption of the BDD "Given-When-Then" formatting helped to create a library of reusable phrases to make Test Case creation easier and more streamlined.

A robust collection of Java based Selenium Test Steps also meant that maintain and updating the code base was also simple and streamlined, allowing myself or my team to on-board new Test Engineers quickly or allow our Developers to understand how the applications they were bringing to life were being tested beyond their Unit Testing requirements. While these automation test were often not seen by anyone beyond the testing team, I would often push for this level of clarity and share-ability across our testing suites so that in the off chance someone from the Business or Development teams were interested or found a need to take a look into our Automation Code, they would be able to peer behind the curtain and easily understand the efforts of the testing teams with little guidance.