Memoirs of Selenium Conference 2015
Curious to know how the Selenium Conference 2015 went, and what was discussed? Find out here!
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Feb 25, 20214 min read
This year, QualiTest sent a group of testers to the Selenium Conference, and WOW, did we have a great time! It was an amazing experience, and I am so grateful that I was lucky enough to go! I never realized that the software testing community was so close knit, and really dedicated to their craft. Attending the conference made me feel completely inspired about becoming more of a part of this community, because so many people have really great knowledge and wisdom to share that we as a company could benefit from.
But don’t just take my word for it – let’s hear what some of our other attendees had to say!
This was my first time attending a conference of this magnitude that also relates to the field of work I do every day. It was interesting to hear some of the new advancements automation testing has done to improve the limitations automation testing has had in the past, like with mobile test automation. New open source tools such as Appium have made strides to making mobile automation a lot more feasible. Also, hearing the obstacles and issues that other professionals encounter was interesting to listen to, reassuring that I’m not the only one.
Some highlights of the trip included:
QualiTest Invades Selenium Conference 2015
The conference had a variety of interesting speakers, which has provided me with a host of topics, tools, and methodologies to discover.
The most interesting technology pieces were the discussions covering advances in the WebDriver interface. Selenium-based automation for iOS machines is still a thorn in many programmers’ minds, but with development by Facebook of the WebDriverAgent and FBSimulatorControl projects should definitely alleviate some of the compatibility and technical hurdles once faces when trying to create a maintainable cross-platform framework. Also, I learned that Microsoft Edge will be shipping with an implementation of the WebDriver interface; Firefox is also developing a new implementation for WebDriver, called Marionette, whose completion is time critical since newer Firefox versions will be incompatible with WebDriver due to a number of security enhancements browsers are now putting in place.
Modeling the SmartBear slippers!
The best speaker, without a doubt, was Jason Huggins, whose craziness only added to his talks. The robots were cool – but the most insightful bit to come out of his speech was the changing nature of Web automation: testers are still focused on automation using traditional tools like the mouse and keyboard, and testing web functionality. But mobile devices are getting smarter – with motion-based actions and the ability for software to interact with hardware remotely – and new challenges presented by these changes will need to be addressed in the upcoming years. It’s great that the W3C is producing a recommendation for the WebDriver interface to force all vendors to implement consistently, and hopefully this interface will expand to include the newer forms of testing that are emerging with the changing technologies.
There were two talks concerning building robust page objects APIs that I found really interesting. One was a 5 minute lightning talk mostly demonstrating the benefit of DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) page objects which can reduce boilerplate code and cost of maintenance. This one showed less of the how and more of the why. Another talk went through the entire process of building a surprisingly robust and full featured page object API.
The short answer? YES. The knowledge that gets shared here is invaluable. This isn’t just some conference full of software companies trying to hawk their wares. This is a conference full of people who use Selenium to do their jobs and build careers and they have so many lessons to share.
