Nortal Summer University Workshop About Tools for Front End Testing

On last week Nortal held Summer University once again for junior specialists who want to join us. The first week was about general introductions and workshops just to give a taste about Nortal itself and about the role of juniors (some of them are developers, some of them analysts and testers, of course). So I did a small workshop about tools for testing front end and I want to share some thoughts about it.

The content of the workshop is available at GitHub repo – github.com/iriiiina/nsu. You can find three exercises, used tools and further reading there. The workshop was made for non-IT people, who were not encountered testing before.

First two exercises I've made specifically for this workshop, so you can find some hidden bugs in HTML and JavaScript code using DevTool or some browser extensions. Third exercise was about REST services and Postman, so the link is just a sandbox where you can take a lot of different types of REST services.

The slides are here, but they are not very useful without the explanation:


This is the first workshop that I would like to reuse and improve – I never wanted to repeat any of my previous workshops before. I don't know why, may be because this one is simple and can be introduced to any kind of specialists and levels.

I didn't get a lot o feedback from participants (there was about 10 people), but here are some:

• I found front-end testing tools part really useful.
• Very informative, nicely composed workshop plan.
• Very useful tools; a bit hard to follow the demonstration at times.
• The topics were cool and informative but the presentation was a little slow.

The presentation was indeed slow for some IT students, because they already knew DevTool and may be some other stuff. So one of the lessons for the next time is to create more flexible content and give an opportunity to dive deeper for people who are bored.

The second lesson is better plan less and make more breaks, which in this case worked great for me. I was actually surprised how timing went well this time.

And the last lesson is don't waste time on technical stuff that doesn't matter for the main goal. For example, don't mess with creating your own REST services if you want to show Postman. Or don't deal with data base if you want to just print some data (you can save it into browser storage or into session). It went quite well this time as well, mainly because I had a limited time for preparation, so external limitation didn't allowed me to play with all this stuff, which is sure interesting, but makes everything more complex.

In summary, this was the first workshop that didn't make me think that I hate public speaking. Maybe because I was least prepared for it and improvised a lot.