Favorite Talks from Selenium Conference Austin 2017

It’s amazing that the recently concluded Selenium Conference over at Austin Texas continues to live up to expectations, building up on the previous conferences and keeps delivering quality talks on automation and testing. And what’s more interesting is to know how they’ve been keeping up with everything with help from the Software Freedom Conservancy and the testing community. There’s even a European Selenium Conference happening on October 9-10, which I’m very much looking forward to.

Meanwhile, here are some of my favorite talks from the Austin conference:

• Automate Windows and Mac Apps with the WebDriver Protocol (by Dan Cuellar, Yosef Durr, and Stuart Russell, about easily automating Windows and Mac apps using Appium)
• Automating Restaurant POS with Selenium – A Case Study (by Jeffrey Payne, about automating a point-of-sale system for testing, including credit card readers, printers, cash drawers, and caller IDs)
• Selenium State of the Union (by Simon Stewart, on an overview of the W3C spec process and about naming things in the Selenium project, how APIs should be correct and how people won’t write their own, how not everyone is a sophisticated developer, and how testing is under resourced)
• Leverage your Load Tests with JMeter and Selenium Grid (by Christina Thalayasingam, on adding load tests for your system using JMeter and Selenium Grid in combination)
• Selenium and the Software Freedom Conservancy (by Karen Sandler, on the safety and efficacy of proprietary medical devices and how often open-source software are more likely to be safer and better over time, and about what kind of organization the Software Freedom Conservancy is and how it helps open-source projects like Selenium continue to live on for the long-term)
• Stop Inspecting, Start Glancing (by Dan Gilkerson, on automating web apps without looking at the DOM structure)
• Transformative Culture (by Ashley Hunsberger, about moving from QA to Engineering Productivity and the culture changes necessary for getting better at testing)

About Selenium Conference 2016

I had time over the holidays to binge watch last years Selenium Conference talks, which was as awesome, if not more so, as the talks during the 2015 conference. Automation in testing has really come a long way, alongside the advancements in technology and software development, and this brings forth new challenges for all of us who test software. It’s not just about Selenium anymore. Mobile automation still proves to be challenging, and soon we’ll have to build repeatable test scenarios for the internet of things – homes, vehicles, stores, among others. Software testing can only get more interesting by the year.

Here are my picks for the best talks from the conference, if you’re curious:

• Zen and the Art of Open Source Maintenance (by Simon Stewart, about how software fails a lot of the time and yet things can still work and is a good thing, about how writing code is actually about people, and about open source projects)
• The Screenplay Pattern – a SOLID alternative to Page Objects (by Antony Marcano, about how the page-object pattern has a problem with satisfying the open-closed principle and what alternative can we use)
• The State of Browser Automation with JavaScript (by Umar Hansa, about how browser automation using javascript has improved in recent years)
• StarDriver Enterprise – Appium to the Future (by Jonathan Lipps, about how the Appium project has exploded from mobile apps automation to including television and desktop apps automation, and their plans for the future)
• Robots – The Nuclear Option (by Jason Huggins, about test scenarios where robots can definitely aid in automation, and about how robots bring more fun into automating things)
• Big Data makes the Flake go Away (by Dave Cadwallader, about flaky tests and how leveraging data analysis can help us combat the problem)
• Advanced Test Automation Techniques for Responsive Apps and Sites (by Adam Carmi, about testing responsive web applications and where Applitools Eyes can assist)
• Continuously Testing Online, Interactive Curriculum at Code.org (by Brian Jordan, about the journey of Code.org to testing their sites using Selenium)

About Selenium Conference 2015

I didn’t know there was such a thing as a yearly Selenium conference, after all this time implementing a Selenium test automation project at work, until I came across a recent blog post by the Mozilla Web QA Team, enumerating their thoughts about the event. I wished I was there (and I wish there were events like this here in my country), especially when I saw some of the keynote presentations and talks they were able to film. I must say that they were very interesting. 🙂

Here are links to these videos, re-posted from the Mozilla Web QA blog:

• Selenium: State of the Union. Fun and exciting keynote talk by Simon Stewart of Facebook, about where Selenium has been, where it is now, and where it is moving forward.
• Mobile End-to-End Testing at Scale: Stable, Useful, Easy – Pick Three –. Inspiring talk from Remi Chaintron of Facebook. Yes, end-to-end automated UI testing is hard, but it does work.
• Docker Selenium. I love the way Marek Jastrzebski of HomeAway talks, how it feels very accommodating. Anyway, Docker seems to be very useful. I’ll try to figure out how this works in Windows.
• Distributed Automation using Selenium Grid/AWS/Auto-scaling. I was bored by Ragavan Ambighanantha’s talk (of Expedia), but I wanted to know the results of his experiments with Selenium Grid parallelization combined with Amazon Web Services cloud-based testing.