The European Selenium Conference is underway in Berlin but before the talks for that event get uploaded online I thought I should finish binge-watching this year’s Sauce Conference videos first. Many of the talks in SauceConf 2017 are actually similar in feel to those I’ve watched in previous Selenium Conferences, except that a number of them point out how awesome Sauce Labs‘ service has been for their cross-browser and cross-platform testing needs. Not that I mind nor I disagree, even if I have not used Sauce Labs’ extensively. Test automation in the web application space has been mostly stable in recent years and that’s a good thing. Now we are left with discussing the consequences of the automated systems that we have put in place and focusing on other areas which needs further improvement.
Anyway, here are my favorite talks from the conference:
- The Philosophy and Future of Automation (by Jonathan Lipps, about the generic concept of automation, some of the history behind it, the benefits of using it, and, more importantly, the consequences of its use that we need to continuously be aware of)
- Cognitive Bias and its Impact on Continuous Improvement (by Jason Hand, about DevOps, our inherent biases and cognitive limits, and how these affect the testing that we do everyday)
- Making Your Mobile Apps Automatable (by Dan Cuellar, who guides us with the important questions we need to ask ourselves as an organization before we write automated checks)
- The Build That Cried Broken – Building Trust in Your Continuous Integration Tests (by Angie Jones, who reuses Aesop’s fables to teach us lessons for building trust in tests that are running in CI tools)
- Test All The Things – Mobile Edition (by Asaf Saar and Neil Manvar, about an approach to writing tests that run in parallel in various platforms and configurations)
- Are Manual Testers Needed in Organizations Practicing Modern DevOps? (by Anurag Sharma, about findings ways to provide value as a software tester who doesn’t write any automation, and the inevitability of learning technical things)
