About the Authors

Meir Bar-Tal holds a Master's Degree in Cognitive Psychology from the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, but he made a swift switch to the software industry in 2000 and is currently an independent test automation architect. In 2007, Meir was one of the cofounders of the popular knowledge sharing site www.advancedqtp.com (originally founded as a personal blog by Yaron Assa) and has been its Editor in Chief and Forum Administrator ever since (sole owner since 2011). The site's forums were among the final four candidates at the Automated Testing Institute Awards several times, and once were second only to the renowned SQA Forums. Apart from the materials he publishes on his site from time to time, Meir is a regular contributor to several professional online groups and forums and also conducts lectures on UFT at Ness IT Business College (Israel) and other institutions. In 2008, he joined Yaron Assa and others in establishing a small consultancy firm, SOLMAR Knowledge Networks Ltd., which was active until early 2011, when the partners decided to go their separate paths. Since then, Meir worked as an independent freelancer and became a SmartBear Software Authorized Provider. In 2011, he developed a QTP plugin for SeeTest, which enabled interoperability and IntelliSense. In 2014, he joined UGenTech Ltd. as the Associate Director of Automation.

Meir has been involved in many projects characterized by a wide array of technologies (COM, Unix, Windows, Web, .NET, Win Forms, WPF, Java, C#, and so on) and business industries (Derivatives, Banking, Medical, Storage, CRM, Billing, VOIP, and so on). The range of services he provides is wide and includes consultancy, project management, design and development, training and coaching, tools evaluation, and extensibility and plugins development.

Meir has provided services to firms such as HP Software, Experitest, Omnisys, IBM XIV, Hermes Logistics, Bank Leumi, YIT, Ginger Software, and Mazor Robotics. Before he co-found Solmar in 2008, he worked for several companies, including dbMotion, Type Reader, Amdocs, Matrix, and ultimately, Super Derivatives. At Super Derivatives, he led a team of QTP developers to implement an object-oriented framework for QTP, a point that reflects his special interest in the design and development of frameworks and enthusiasm to share the fruits of his research and experience with others. In 2013-2014, he was, as a subcontractor, technical lead of a challenging project at HP Software, in which UFT was used to automate end-to-end scenarios for HP ALM with great success. Besides this, he works in close cooperation with HP Software R&D and periodically contributes his insights to improve UFT.

It would not have been possible to accomplish this piece of work without the assistance (and patience) of several people to whom I wish to express my gratitude and deep appreciation. First and foremost, to my late father who, by his own example, taught me that giving up is not an option; second, to my beloved daughters who always give me strength to accomplish more than what seems feasible; third, to my mother, who has always loved and supported, though not understood, me and all my endeavors; fourth, to my reviewers and editors, who contributed to me personally and to the final quality of this book.

Last, but not least, to all members of Packt Publishing, for giving me this wonderful, exciting, and challenging opportunity to share my knowledge. I wish to extend my special appreciation to Anila Vincent, for her understanding of the difficulties I faced during this project and her virtually unlimited patience, which unfortunately, I was forced to put to the test more than once.

Jonathon Lee Wright has over 15 years of international automation experience with a number of global organizations, including Lehman Brothers, Hitachi Consulting, Siemens, Thomson Reuters, New Zealand Lotteries Commission, PlanIT (Sydney), Unisys (iPSL), Xerox (BJSS), Hewlett Packard (Enterprise), and Microsoft (ALM). Currently, he provides enterprise-wide Portfolio Lifecycle Management at Deutsche Bank as part of the test automation transition initiative, targeting 2,700 applications for test automation across the bank's global digital enterprise landscape/ecosystem.

Jonathon also contributed to the best-selling book Experiences of Test Automation: Case Studies of Software Test Automation, Dorothy Graham and Mark Fewster, Addison Wesley, and a number of books on Testing as a Service (TaaS) models (epistemic and systemic entropy) and API testing in the cloud (service and network virtualization). He is the founder of Test Automation as a Service (TaaaS.net) and Automation Development Services (automation.org.uk) and the Hybrid approach pattern (2004). He has also presented at various international testing conferences, such as Gartner (London), STARWest (California), Fusion (Sydney), ANZTB (Melbourne), EuroSTAR (Gothenburg and Dublin), BCS SIGIST (London). Further details about Jonathon can be found at www.linkedin.com/in/automation.

I would like to thank my father John Wright, without whose support and encouragement none of this would have been possible, for providing the solid foundation for my success over the years. Then, I would like to thank everyone at Packt Publishing, especially Shweta Pant for her support during the technical editing.