Unveiling the Maestros: Spotlighting Benjamin Bischoff

While the speakers themselves may steal the spotlight, it is the brilliant minds and dedicated craftsmanship of these people that bring them to life. Get to know Benjamin Bischoff!

# Can you introduce yourself in a few words?

My name is Benjamin Bischoff and I work as a Test Automation Engineer at trivago in Düsseldorf, Germany. I have been in testing for the last 7 years. Before that, I worked as a developer for 15 years. Apart from tech, my main hobbies are close-up magic and creating video games.

# Could you provide an overview of your role as a Test Automation Engineer at Trivago N.V.? What are your primary responsibilities?

When I started at trivago, I was mainly responsible for creating our in-house UI based end-to-end framework as well as build and test pipelines surrounding this. This focus has now shifted to back-end automation which includes things like REST, gRPC, GCP, databases etc. I am part of the QA team along with my other Test Automation Engineer colleagues which makes this the perfect setup for us.

# What is the favourite part of your job?

My absolute favourite aspects of my job are the constant learning. In my role, I touch on so many different subjects and technologies that it never gets boring. Also, combining my development experiences like using clean code principles with test code is very satisfying.

# Can you share an example of a complex or challenging automation project you worked on at Trivago N.V.? How did you approach it, and what were the outcomes or lessons learned?

A rather complex topic I had to deal with recently were testing gRPC services using the Karate framework. This typically requires a lot of boilerplate code to access these services and deal with requests and responses. I created an extension for Karate that handles it more straightforward and with only a few lines of code which reduces the complexity for creating these scenarios. My biggest learning was that it is not only important to create tests but also to flatten the learning curve to do that. Both plays a role for increasing coverage.

# If you had to sum up your career in one sentence, what would you say?

I went from developer to Test Automation engineer and have never regretted this.

# If you could invent any piece of technology that doesn't currently exist, what would it be and why?

I would like to have a generative AI that is unable to create wrong answers and sell them as the truth.

# If you could time-travel to any point in history with a piece of modern technology, where would you go and what would you bring?

There are too many bad things that have happened in history. I would travel there with a TV just beforehand and show documentaries that highlight the cruelties beforehand. That would certainly save some lives.

# If you could switch careers with anyone for a day, who would it be and why?

I would probably switch careers with David Copperfield for one day. He still has a successful Las Vegas show and I would love to see what life would be like as a professional magician. Unfortunately, I only have the hobbyist perspective in this field.

# Considering your extensive experience, what advice would you give to someone looking to transition into test automation as a career path?

My advice would be to learn about testing first and then continue with software development aspects like programming concepts, CI/CD, containers… But this heavily depends on your use cases and role, so try to find out what will be required and don’t blindly dive into all the subjects but carefully select what makes sense at that point.

# What is your message for our Romania IT community?

I have visited Romania multiple times, both as a developer and Test Automation Engineer. Romania, and especially Bucharest, has a great software community and I am very excited to being there again. I'm especially looking forward to having interesting conversations and getting food for thought.

Join us and meet him at DevTalks!