Our Speakers: The People Behind the Code pt.4

Next up is someone who has been in the software testing field since 2003. When you've been navigating a field for that long, you gain a perspective that’s incredibly valuable. Let's talk about Dirk O. Schweier.

Dirk started his journey in quality assurance and, since 2010, has been working as a consultant, diving deep into test automation, performance engineering, and test management. He’s seen firsthand how the shift to Agile has created new challenges for testers. His mission has been clear: automate as much as possible to provide fast, meaningful feedback. He believes that the key to efficient automation isn't just about using one tool well, but about making different tools work together effectively. He has a knack for looking closely at those integration points.

Bridging the Gap Between Automation and Performance

This brings us to a classic problem many of us have faced. You have a solid set of automated functional tests, but then it's time for performance testing. The tools are different, the approach is different, and you often end up re-implementing the same test cases just to measure performance. It’s double the work, and nobody wants that.

Dirk’s presentation, "Robot Framework Listener as a mediator of metrics," offers a clever solution to this exact problem.

He’s developed an integration that uses a Robot Framework listener to act as a bridge. While your existing Robot Framework tests run, the listener gathers the performance metrics and sends them directly to a specialized performance tool like NeoLoad. This means you don't have to rebuild your test scenarios from the ground up. The test automation engineers can create the test cases, and the performance engineers can use them immediately to start their analysis.

If you’re looking for a practical way to avoid redundant work and integrate your performance testing more smoothly with your existing automation, this is a session you won't want to miss.

You can connect with Dirk on his LinkedIn profile.