Date: 28 August 2024
Location: Online
Using artificial intelligence (AI) in software testing has become essential for streamlining processes, enhancing efficiency, and enabling organisations to deliver high-quality software products more efficiently. Our webinar series titled ‘AI Testing Talks’ features discussions on AI-related topics exploring various aspects of software testing and AI technology including Generative AI, AI-powered test tools, the impact of AI biases, the role of AI in software testing, and more. The sessions provide you with the opportunity to stay updated on recent tech trends and discover strategies to improve your current projects with a cutting-edge technology stack.
AI Testing Talks participants are encouraged to engage in the Q&A session, ask questions, and share their thoughts.
On 28 August, we held the next session of our ‘AI Testing Talks’ webinar featuring invited speaker Bas Dijkstra, Independent Test Automation Consultant and Trainer.
Who will Guard the Guards? An Introduction to Mutation Testing
Development teams write tests to check that their code behaves as intended. However, the quality of these tests is unfortunately often underappreciated. If any attention is paid to test quality at all, it is typically done in terms of code coverage, which, as attendees will see from examples I'm using in the talk, is a flawed metric. Yet, teams rely on the results of these tests in their software development lifecycle and build pipelines. But are those tests reliable? Isn't there a better way to get information about the quality of our tests? In this talk, participants will get a practical introduction to mutation testing and how this technique can be used to get better insight into the quality of their tests. After discussing the flaws of code coverage as a quality metric, the concepts of false positives and false negatives, and the underlying concepts of mutation testing and how it tries to address these issues, I will conduct a live demo of mutation testing, covering:
- how to add mutation testing to an existing set of tests,
- how to run a mutation testing tool and interpret the results,
- how to improve the existing set of unit tests for better mutation testing scores.
The live demo part of the talk was done using PITest and Java. All code used was made publicly available on GitHub. The concepts, however, apply to other mutation testing tools and programming languages just as much.
Invited Speaker
Bas Dijkstra
Independent Test Automation Consultant and Trainer
Bio
Hey, my name is Bas Dijkstra, and I am an independent test automation consultant and trainer.
I have been active in the test automation field for some 18 years now, and have worked on software testing and automation solutions across a wide range of programming languages, frameworks and technology stacks.
I’ve delivered test automation training to dozens of companies and hundreds of conference attendees in the Netherlands as well as abroad, to excellent reviews.
You can find a complete overview of my professional life on my LinkedIn profile. If you want to get in touch, please use the contact form on this site, or send me an email at bas@ontestautomation.com.
I’m also the developer at RestAssured.Net, a library that is meant to make writing tests for HTTP APIs in C# a breeze.
I live in Amersfoort, The Netherlands, together with my wife and two sons. When I am not at work, I like to go outside for a run or a long bike ride, or to sit down and read a good book.
AI Testing Talks Moderator
Anna-Maria Lukina
Marketing Director, Exactpro
Bio
Anna-Maria Lukina is a Marketing Director at Exactpro responsible for global brand and business development, management of industry events and professional development initiatives. With a deep understanding of information systems and technologies and extensive experience in global marketing, Anna-Maria has successfully led the Exactpro brand through product launches, the acquisition by LSEG and the following buyout, countless international and local industry gatherings, as well as the accompanying social media campaigns.
Anna-Maria has been spearheading Exactpro’s award-winning AI Testing course as Outreach Director.
Q&A Session Expert
Iosif Itkin
CEO and co-founder of Exactpro
Bio
Iosif Itkin is a co-founder & co-CEO of Exactpro, an independent provider of software testing services for financial sector organisations. Founded in 2009, Exactpro employs over 450 specialists. Among other things Iosif is responsible for the AI Testing strategy and trading systems reliability research. He holds a MSc degree in Theoretical Physics.
In his professional career, Iosif has held many technology roles: software developer, performance testing department lead, technology architect, VP of technology – on a number of global financial industry initiatives. Iosif’s expertise at the intersection of high-availability systems and capital markets has enabled him to successfully facilitate technology transformations within exchanges, investment banks and clearing and settlement organisations in London, New York, Milan, Singapore, Sydney and other major financial centres.
About Exactpro
Exactpro is an independent provider of AI-enabled software testing services for financial sector organisations. Our clients are exchanges, post-trade platform operators, and banks across 20 countries. Our area of expertise comprises protocol-based testing of matching engines, market data, market surveillance, clearing and settlement systems, payments APIs. We help our clients to decrease time to market, maintain regulatory compliance, improve scalability, latency and operational resiliency. Exactpro is involved in a variety of transformation programmes related to large-scale cloud and DLT implementations at systemically important organisations.
Our approaches leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to help harness the power of exploratory data analysis and big data analytics to assist in the generation of test ideas and the interpretation of test results, supported by advanced execution capabilities of the th2 frameworks suite.
Founded in 2009, the Exactpro Group is headquartered in the UK and operates delivery centres in Georgia, Sri Lanka, Armenia, Lithuania and the UK and representative offices in the US, Canada, Italy and Australia.