We attended the first Copado Robotic Testing Hackathon

Last June, we received an invitation to the first Copado Robotic Testing (CRT) hackathon hosted by the Copado Community. The event, which came shortly after Copado had won The Globee Awards 2022, was open to CRT-certified professionals who were looking for hands-on experience and were ready to bring innovative solutions to the table.

Quite frankly we did not expect too much in the beginning and thought it would just be another coding challenge. It turned out to be an amazing experience with participants from around the world happy to share their ideas and help each other. To our surprise, the panel of experts loved our solution in the end, which we had the opportunity to proudly present at the “Influence the Product” seminar.

And what did we actually do? To warm up, we built a test case that automated sharing of status on Salesforce Chatter. We also automated the creation of a new Case on the e-Bikes guest site and validated that the Case had been successfully created in Salesforce. Finally, we automated the creation of a new product in Salesforce and verified it became available on the guest site.

Then we got together as a team to brainstorm on how we could improve Copado Robotic Testing as a product. We were given two different challenges to work on. The first one was less technical and was about collaboration. Copado believes that collaboration is the key to breaking the quality silos in IT organizations and to delivering the best quality to the end user. We had to revisit our experience and come up with a design idea for fostering collaboration on CRT. This was a wide and abstract topic.

The second challenge was about version control improvement. CRT already integrates with major GIT services like GitLab, GitHub, Bitbucket, Azure Repos, etc. so that testers can version their tests. At the end of the day, automated tests are code, and they should be treated as such. But versioning is a complicated topic, and many professional users are not well-versed in version control systems. Not to mention business users who are typically scared away. Therefore, the task at hand was to develop a product concept for enhancing the version control integration in CRT and the user experience. Here we proposed direct integration of a git repository with the CRT cloud file system. To make it easier for less tech-savvy professionals we designed a toolbar for the CRT QEditor UI with color coding of test cases depending on their position on the branch – a solution that was picked as one of the three most innovative presented.

It was a great experience overall. And even though we didn’t end up as the winning team, what we learned over those few days will benefit us in our future projects. We all know the importance of having an easy and scalable way to test. Through the Copado Hackathon, we got hands-on experience and saw the full potential of this automated software testing solution. We upgraded our skills and had fun along the way. More importantly, we met with CRT product leaders and DevOps pros and grew our professional network. And that’s great for business.