Crafting Custom Tools

A lot of the activities you need to do as part of test execution/validation/testautomation you can ‘automate/generate’ by building your own tools, either by combining existing tooling or GEN AI.

Key learnings

• Automate to simplify test processes and access new ways of working.
• Defer dull and precise testing jobs to simple tools.
• Use existing tools, libraries and GEN-AI to build your own tools.

Build the Right Tool for Right Now

Efficient testing needs good tooling – and the right custom tools enable powerful, focussed test approaches. In this innovative workshop, you’ll combine common, accessible tools to build automation for your own testing tasks.

We’ll focus on testing-relevant work like comparing datasets, generating bulk data, wrangling environments, enhancing unit tests with custom matchers and exploring code with generated UIs. We’ll use spreadsheets, shell prompts, and LLMs to access simple automation that perfectly suits your teams’ needs. 

After a grounding in the basics of building tools for tasks, our three experienced presenters will help you work together on custom tools. By the end of this interactive tutorial you will have the confidence and starting skills to work on your own toolset – and a handful of example tools that you’ve already built. Enhance your testing powers by making the right tool for your work.

We can all buy or find tools – this is about making tools, generally by chaining and redeploying tools we can all access.

A tool is something we control that does something better than we can unequipped. In the physical world, tools generally have a place where the human interacts, a part that changes force or size or precision, and a place that interacts with whatever is being worked on. Tools generally outlast the work, but disposable / ephemeral tools are important, if easy to overlook. A tool may not do the work, but make some part of the work possible; we can do some without a ruler or a dust sheet, but we might well not choose to start the work.

In testing, we use tools all the time. To work as professionals and as craftspeople, James (+) reckons you need to be able to make the tools you need.